Endurance & Fragility

By Edge of Humanity Magazine, April 16, 2021

Photographer Ziyun Zou is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘I AM FINE: Not Completely Falling Apart’. To see Ziyun’s body of work, click on any image.

Mask

Spume

Life is fragile. During the lockdown, a complete transformation of life was experienced as if everyone had to press the pause button on the routine of their lives. There was a demand which was issued out of this fabric of life, and with this, a series of questions arose between the space of endurance and fragility.

Lines

Fragility was a sense that I had been co-existing with since my earliest childhood. I was born in a small room and lived there until I was two and a half years old. That room was the extent of my universe. I was a locked away, enduring secret isolation, a social blind spot, unrecorded in a state of not knowing. That room is like a scar that lies deep within my flesh, which will never be erased. Memories can be like scar tissue drawing lines within your process of becoming. Imagine the shock of seeing the literal scars on my mother’s body. Such scars are written on the outside, whereas mine are written on my invisible inside.

Mother’s Path

Sense

So, I am back within a confined space. It is as if my first room is folded into this room. Maybe it is like an echo chamber. A whole constellation of figures circulate within this space: trauma, isolation, memory, affect, ghosts, uncanny, mourning, oblivion. The images start to circulate as well, but it is as if there are gaps between images and words. I am in search of a space that might occasion a meeting point of images, words, and gaps. This otherness of space is what I call art because it is the place of aesthetic fascination.

Breath

In this third space, I finally experience an acceptance of my life. It should be understood as just another texture or even a text already written. I say to myself that this space is the fold of my exteriority, a meeting point of the fragility of life within its endurance of the conditions which sustain it.

Life is fragile, but it endures within a curvature of becoming other.