Mode of Hope
When hope is stripped of naïve optimism, it retains its revolutionary edge protecting politics from hopelessness, turning it into a tool for critique and collective struggle rather than a comforting illusion.
Hope is on the horizon: when I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. You ask: What is hope for? It is for this, for walking.
Roni Horn’s work taught me one crucial thing: using the illusion of materiality to reflect a deeper truth is, in itself, a powerful strategy (see Hope as Material). Hope as strategy strips away naive optimism, it becomes a meticulously calculated methodology aimed at breaking the deadlock of reality. In these installations, technology is not merely decorative, but a “syntactic strategy” I have deliberately deployed. I use the stillness of the picture frame, the camouflage of the plant, and the objectivity of the clock as bait to lower the audience’s guard. When the hidden interaction suddenly occurs, that tension—drifting between astonishment and surprise—is exactly the moment the strategy takes effect. By constructing an experience that weaves between the deceptive and the real, we forcefully tear open a rift in an indifferent world, allowing genuine connections to take place. (Yiwen Che)