A Porn Writer
2021Artist in Residency program OAZO AIR, Amsterdam
In the last three months of 2021, the shadow of the pandemic, which has lasted for two years, still seems to hover over people's heads. During my three-month residence in OAZO, I hardly went out and seldom contacted other people, and firmly adhered to the lax prevention regulations. I was under the cloudy weather in the Netherlands and worried about my unknown life. When I saw the books on the shelf, I thought, why didn't I write a book on my own? So I started to play the role of a lonely and autistic porn writer— 'Hairy-Leg', who writes day and night in a space where he eats, lives, and works. For him, porn seems to be the simplest and most primitive self-consolation.
As a novelist, Hairy-Leg was used to writing on the couch in front of the window; he liked the green lawn outside. To his surprise, he was not as alone as he thought. He could occasionally see rats, pigeons, crows, seagulls, and an elegant stork through the shutters. When the lady upstairs threw bread down, countless birds would fly over to enjoy. Although the number of pigeons was the largest, crows and seagulls were always the overlords. When they landed, the poor pigeons could only wait cautiously. Before the birds noticed the bread, the rats' family would start their carnival first. Hairy-Leg had never seen such giant rats, which surprised him. When he stared at the animals outside the window, the leaves of the shutter seemed to become the iron railings of the prison. He thought, maybe he was even not as good as a rat.
As the one who acts the novelist, I honestly started the writing of the novel "The Dragon Tail" on an unknown Chinese literary website and published the first chapter on 10th Oct; as of now (13th Dec 2021), this novel has been collected by 2019 readers, and the novelist has also got 570 followers, and about 195 euros from the VIP chapters... I made it a softcover book and manually blacked out all the sentences to focus on 'behaviour' rather than 'content'. As another part of the immersive stage, the role of the novelist's animal friends was also crucial. I used a 3D printing pen to transform their images, which aligned with the novelist's understanding of them—an unconscious existence and unknown participation.
When we talk about the influence of the times on the individual's mental state, from a broad environment to an invisible inner world, where should we start? When real life cannot meet our internal emotional needs, 'daydreaming' seems to have become a kind of lowest-cost relief; the novelist- Hairy-Leg is just an example. I hope to explore the relationship between personal psychology and the living environment by observing tiny individuals arouse the audience's attention to their inner state, which is my original intention to create this Hairy-Leg world.
