I know what you are trying to say II is artist Ting-Ting Cheng's first solo exhibition in Japan. Originally exhibited in London, the solo show comprised three projects - I judge a book by its cover (2010), Dubbing Project (2012),  The mechanism of speaking Chinese (2012)

Using photography, video and an interactive card game to explore the relationship between language, communication and cultural identity, examining how people relate to, understand, or misunderstand unfamiliar languages and cultures. For the exhibition at Gallery Nomart, Cheng added another recent project Involuntary Reader (2012) in the collection. The project examines the process of transmission of language and text in a different perspective, questioning how the selected and censored information formed our perception towards the society.

The exhibition starts from I judge a book by its cover. For the project, Cheng borrowed books from libraries in London, of languages that she didnﾕt understand - literally selecting books by their covers. In these large-scale photographs, the books are viewed stacked up from the side like dense towers of inaccessible information. For Cheng, the work is symbolic of the barriers that language can create; how the simple fact of not being able to understand a language can exclude people within a society.

And in Involuntary Reader, Cheng examines the everyday-life objects and the façade-like character of image even further. Same as I judge a book by its cover, the information in the newspapers is hidden, only the objectivity of the papers themselves is emphasized. For the project, she didnﾕt buy any newspaper, magazine, or watch any TV news in 100 days. Instead, she only read newspapers that came to her hands that she didnﾕt ask for, in order to be an involuntary reader. She collected these materialized information, photographed them, and then noted down the time and location where they met. She intends to map the web information flow and the “reality” constructed by free media. Slowly and silently, the information here formed her perception towards the society.

And on the language perspective, in Dubbing Project, unlike I judge a book by its cover, “not being able to understand” becomes a tool to create new meanings and narratives, also suggesting the potential for communication beyond words. Cheng asks people with different native languages to interpret scenes from Taiwanese films, to imagine what is being said from the body language, tone of voice and mood. The original version is dubbed with the new translation, in the new language, creating a different scene and atmosphere.

Conversely, Mechanism of speaking Chinese upstairs plays around the stereotype of a culture created by “not being able to understand” . In the card game, participants were asked to take a number of cards containing English words that sound like Chinese words, and read them out in front of a camera. The ensuing string of words is nonsense in both languages, and sounds like someone mimicking Chinese. Drawing on the derogatory Western phrase “ching chong” , the work questions negative cultural stereotypes associated with the apparently “meaningless” sound of an unknown language.

*image (left)
© Cheng Ting-Ting
courtesy of the artist, Gallery NOMART, Galerie Grand Siècle