Ni Hui
Fine-art ProjectsLife Report-19492020
The Lingering Shadow
The Sharpness of Fading
The Uninherited

Other Projects
Stages of Love
V-POV
I Am My Only Witness
Fashion
Profile

Glaring, Nauseous, Dizzy, Anxious, Restless, Irritable

I often experience these feelings on the road back to boarding school after leaving home. The sunlight piercing into the car wraps me in a wave of heat, blurring my vision. That's what it feels like at a boarding school where you only get a break every two weeks: school and home seem like two parallel worlds, and moving between them is exhausting. When I'm in one, I can't truly experience the other; I can only guess the state of the other place through increasingly blurred memories.

I often feel like my room is a hotel, and I am just a weekend guest. By denying my rightful claim to this space, I stop being troubled by the changes that aren't from me. But at the same time, I lose the sense of security that comes with something "belonging to me." The more I care about possessing it, the more anxious I become because I can't control or hold onto it when I leave. Once the door closes, the space is cast out of my world, becoming something like Schrödinger's existence. The insecurity becomes a symphony playing within that space, with chaotic light blurring the edges of all objects. The feeling of losing control, of not being safe, also binds me in its grip. When the door closes behind me, it slices my soul and leaves it within the room. The indent on the mattress is a half-formed body, and the marks on the desk's edge are the echoes of a few quiet sobs. Only when migration becomes second nature do I realize I have never truly owned any space.

This is an autopsy of the symbiotic relationship between a sense of security and the anxiety of losing control. It is also a form of self-redemption through growth. Therefore, I have transformed the work into a suspended theater of trauma, inviting others to feel the deconstruction of security through my own experiences. Footprints across the ceiling bloom with warm light, only to fade into ice blue after departure—just as the sense of security that emerges from touch crumbles with the shift of the gaze.

Is it "owning" that brings us security, or is it something else?

The concept of the video stems from my personal childhood experiences. As a boarding school student with both parents absent, I found it difficult to derive a stable sense of security from any single environment. The two spaces that could provide me with a degree of safety—my room and the school dormitory—formed two almost entirely disconnected worlds. When I was in one of these spaces, the other, which was beyond my control, became a source of unease, giving rise to suspicion and chaos that threatened to swallow me whole.

I lost count of how many times I dreamed of being in one space while actually situated in the other, only to wake up disoriented and disturbed by the shift in reality. Even on my way to school or back home, I would often be overwhelmed by a deep sense of irritation and confusion. These experiences and emotions continue to affect me to this day, and they eventually coalesced into this project.

Through this video, I aim to construct an abstract, void-like psychological space, adopting a detached perspective to observe and reflect on the emotional responses tied to existing within and moving between different spaces. It is an attempt to jointly dissect the intricate relationship between the desire for security and the anxiety of losing control. Using my own experiences as a blueprint, I reenacted and recorded expressions of being in and transitioning through spaces, rendering them in a vague, almost illusory visual form. This imagery, complemented by an intentionally designed aural landscape, collectively conveys the conceptual and emotional core of the work.