Mask - The Invisible Face Of Human

The invisible face contains the entire invisible world.

The world is getting worse. Everyone is living beneath their masks, which serve as their face for business, relationships, politics, etc. I would like to see deeply inside their masks to their real faces, behind their makeup to discern their real thoughts.

I am interested in mask and face. I am trying to find the right way to present the relationship between mask and face as an invisible world. I looked into the transparent materials that can show its reflection, can breathe its soul, can transfer its meaning into the audience.

While reading The Mystery Of Art – Masks – The Other Face by Walter Sorell, I thought the mask is not only the other face of art, but also the other face of human-life. I was not only starting my “art-trip” through theory but also via practice. The first departure is on the train to through England and Western Europe. The trains I ride move from place to place and I meet lots of people with different characters and learn many interesting things that I did not know before. Everyone I talked with, every day I spent doing this, allowed me to absorb his or her perspectives and values.

Train windows captivate me. I love to look through them at people’s faces, the one who is being spoken to, being left behind as the train moves, remaining in the same place; the ones who attract me by their behaviors, etc. Because I feel very uncomfortable to have direct contact with them, I choose to view them by their reflections on the train’s windows. In this form their faces seem normal and natural.

At one point in my journey I had to fly. My flight was delayed; so sitting in the airport I observed people’s actions and reactions through the windows of the waiting rooms. I tried to ascertain the differences of people talking with close friends or family and with strangers. I realized that people are quite prone to showing their real emotions when they are troubled or nervous, especially when they are using public transport. In society nowadays it seems every neutron of the human brain is being used to defend against the darkness of frustration and paranoia, so people prefer to make internal faces—via masks. The mask can be real or unreal but eventually the mask becomes yours and can turn out to be your real face even you don’t want to have it so.

As Sorell quoted:

“The longer you look at a good mask the more charged with life it becomes. A common actor cannot use a really good mask. He cannot make himself one with it. A great actor makes it live.” (The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, 1917).

In Japanese Noh Theater, Sorell theorizes that the actor/dancer wearing his mask must feel the thing as a whole from the inside—“the heart is form” (p.59 – The Other Face: The Mask In The Arts). I found nearly the same is true in Vietnamese drama; the actors use their mask-line make to present the character of the person they are portraying.

At a small town on the German-Austrian border I visited Paul Klee’s house. The German hand puppets of the Klee family reflect upon topics and characters related to politics or society. It is the same with the Mexican dancing mask, “the being portrayed exits only the culture that gave them life.” (Mask - Arts Of Mexico by Dr. Lechuga Ruth, year?)

I wandered around small alleys of a tiny town and stopped at a little shop. There was a mask is hanging on the window, but the door behind it was closed. The combination of objects: the little mask, the window, the door; of materials: paper, glass and iron; the effect of this conglomeration of images from outside to inside creates a bizarre spirit and shows this mask like a real human face.

Somehow in my future performance, I would like to keep my original face but will allow people discover what is my mask and what is my real face. In fact, with me, an empty face contains many masks behind it. People from the East use their faces differently than those of the West. Westerners are more apt to show their thoughts and feelings on their faces. In Eastern societies people can be just as expressive, but in times of extreme emotion—anger, sadness, and disappointment—their faces become expressionless. A mask? To some, yes; to others and to themselves, of course, a sign that they are trying to control themselves. By all means, the face is there; it is just not so obvious.

I arrived in France and visited the Centre Pompidou of Contemporary Art, the modern Bibliography Center of Francoise Mitterrand and other places called “French Modernity Faces.” All of them had been constructed of and/or covered by glass, lenses, Plexiglas and other types of transparent material. They are becoming the future materials for Architecture, Art and Design. It brings people who are living in these “glasshouses” to feel closer to nature and comfortable. With myself, I always feel sick when contemplating a life like this. I would feel like a guinea pig in the lab, running around this greenhouse of a maze, confused, unable to find the way out because everywhere has the same view by reflection.

I used to have a repeated nightmare in which I was lost in a house with all the walls covered by mirrors that transformed me into strange shapes—my nose would lengthen, my eyes would turn upside down, etc… In this nightmare I would touch the different side of myself that I had never seen before. This house contains the invisible self that I had never believed existed. I was nervous and suffered yet simultaneously was excited to recognize the invisible part inside me.

I also found a special feeling when standing into the Ken Lum’s cylinders, in St John’s gardens at the Liverpool Biennial 2006 called “Monument To Napoleon, Prisoners And Other Things In Common” (Liverpool Daily Post, September 2006). He created a large, dark tube like the underground combined with three glass cylinder boxes, which allowed the visitors come into. The audiences would enter one box and there observe the actions of other people in the other boxes. They laughed at each other, were surprised, gained an eerie sense of the “inside” or “underground” world and were interested to explore their own “glass-box.” Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that they could not see themselves, they could only see the others.

I am creating three objects, separate parts of the face: eyes, nose and mouth. I place them with different locations and positions; I rotate, reflect, flip horizontal or vertical; I draw them on different kinds of materials: transparent paper, Plexiglas, magnifying glass; I display them with different styles: hanging, laying them flat… All these ways determine what I can do, what is the right way to present them. My recent concern is creating an object that is small yet can show how powerful is its whole spirit of the invisible world. The same is true for that contained in each face/mask; they can be small, they can be subtle, yet there is great power there. It also must be reflected in the real world via our parallel and objective view.

As Sorell wrote:

“The mask is the beginning, trauma and essence of all metamorphoses, it is the tragic bridge from life into death, it is the illusion of another reality, or the disguise with which man reaches reality on a higher plane, stronger in its awareness, clearer and more concrete in its expression than the elusive image of reality itself. The mask contains the magic of illusion without which man is unable to live.” (The Other Face: The Mask In The Arts by Walter Sorell, 1973)