I have always believed that a work is not most alive in the body of its creator, but in the moment it is seen.
A work needs a spectator; only then is its life-state vivid.
Here, the spectator does not have to be a “person.”
The spectator can be an object, an environment, a flow of thought or consciousness.
A single look, a misreading, a passing glance from someone hurrying by - all of these create a kind of spectatorship, a relational field in which the work can be seen, misunderstood, and born again.
As long as there is some form of “consciousness in presence” responding to a work, it is no longer an orphan abandoned in time.
It enters a state of relation.
What a work truly has is not an isolated audience member, but a viewing relationship that is established, sustained, and remembered.
This belief is, in fact, in tension with my own personality.
My nature is strange, inward, self-sealing. I would rather hide myself away.
For me, social interaction is not a neutral activity, but a labor that consumes life energy.
For almost three years, I lived as if locked inside a shell.
As a creator, I once could not understand, and almost entirely rejected, the small talk that follows every performance or exhibition.
It is very simple: I can hardly detect sincerity in post-show small talk.
Those pleasantries and compliments make me deeply uncomfortable, because I cannot tell whether people really mean what they say.
Someone stands in front of you and says, “That was amazing,” “I was so moved.”
In the social script these are the correct, kind phrases, yet they rarely touch the work itself.
So every “I really love your work” eventually turns into an evaluation of “me as a person,” which triggers my instinct to flee, instead of becoming “Your work did this in me; your work made me think or feel this.”
In that moment, what is being praised is not the thinking capacity of the work, but whether I, as a person, match their expectations.
What I have always longed for is reflection that comes from engaging with the work, not impression management about “me.”
This is why at my own performances and exhibitions, you often cannot find me.
I slip away before the curtain call; at the very moment a work is thrown toward its audience, I have already run far away.
It is as if, so long as I am not present, the work can be seen in a way that does not have to worry about the “image of the creator.”
It does not need me standing beside it, explaining, proving, maintaining some persona.
And yet, paradoxically, I care intensely about spectators.
Without spectatorship, a work, for me, is suffocating.
It can only live a ghost-like existence on a hard drive, on a memory card, in rehearsal notes.
It still exists, but only in a threshold space, not enough to constitute a world.
The creator can give a work its first breath.
It is the spectator who decides whether it gets to take a few more.
And so ELSEHERE appeared.
It was not the result of long careful deliberation and a solemn decision, but rather a series of moves that seemed to happen almost without asking my permission.
Many decisions were made a little rashly, as if I had been pushed onto the road.
One day I realized I had been looking, all along, for a new way: a new structure in which works and spectators could meet.
In conversations with many creators, researchers, editors, collaborators, I suddenly felt very clearly the value of this work.
When they spoke about their worldviews, their histories, the choices they made in moments of difficulty, and their deeply personal understandings of a heavy word like “mission,” I could feel a very primal heat rising inside my body.
This heat does not come from stage lights, but from a sense of being entrusted with something: these works need a better spectatorship, and that structure needs someone to build it.
I often tell those close to me that everything happening now comes from tiny seeds planted long ago.
Those seeds might have come from a book I read as a teenager, the smell of a theater, a bodily memory that had almost been forgotten.
They sprouted slowly in the dark and grew so gradually that it was only recently I realized I was already standing in a small forest.
As for what shape these seeds will ultimately take, I still do not know.
What I do know is that their force has pushed me away from the role of the hidden creator.
I have gone from the person who only works in the dark, to the person who now has to adjust the lights, even though I am still not used to standing in them.
I no longer want a work’s life to end abruptly.
Not only my own works, but the works of countless creators.
Too many things are barely brought into being before they are forced to “die” for lack of a real spectatorship structure: swallowed by algorithms, flattened into archive entries, discarded by the exhibition cycle, shut away in storage spaces and clouds with the lightest tap of a button.
In the contemporary cultural environment, the most common cause of death for a work is not failure; it is “no one continues to watch.”
We are used to the word “audience,” but for me, the more precise word is “spectatorship.”
Audience refers to people.
Spectatorship refers to relation.
It includes who is watching, how they are watching, in what context the work is being seen, who interprets it, who translates it, who misunderstands it, and who carries it somewhere else so it can continue to live.
An audience can be temporary; spectatorship is long-term.
The former is a number; the latter is a structure.
I am more and more aware that the truly important question is not “Is anyone watching?” but “How is it being watched?”
Is it a mode of consumptive browsing, or is it a mode of companionate looking?
Is it a click that treats the work as content, or a willingness to stay, to ruminate, to shoulder questions alongside the work?
For me, “not letting a work die” is a very concrete question:
What do we do with a piece that is never spoken of again after a single performance?
Can a work chopped into a ten-second social media clip retain any trace of its original context?
Can works that are still in formation be seen, heard, and recorded in their “unfinished” stage, instead of having to wait for some institutionally recognized endpoint?
I am not asking these questions only for myself. I know there are tens of thousands of creators facing the same dilemma.
Many works are not “not good enough”; they simply lack:
a spectator who can be reached,
a space where someone is willing to watch for a few more seconds, read one more paragraph, ask one more “What are you doing in this piece?”
So when I say “spectator,” I no longer mean a single audience member.
I mean an entire mechanism that allows a work to be read and reread, to be entered again and again.
A mature ecosystem does not only consist of creators and works; it must also include a carefully designed spectatorship.
ELSEHERE and STRATUM are committed precisely to this latter kind of spectatorship.
A low-noise, slow-paced, high-density mode of seeing.
One that makes room for shy works, unfinished works, works that are still searching for language.
It allows misunderstanding, allows disagreement, allows works to grow different versions of themselves in different spectators, rather than being flattened into “I like it” or “I do not get it.”
Here, a work does not have to first become “easy to cut into ten seconds of video” in order to be considered worthy of being seen.
I want, quite boldly, to retrain and reshape contemporary attention and thinking.
This is also why STRATUM is so important to me.
It is not “introducing works”; it is thinking with them.
It allows texts to remain in a pre-categorical stage, where spectators and creators can wander together in an unfinished language zone, searching for new words, new structures, new syntax.
In this sense, the spectator is not the person standing opposite the work, but the one walking on the same patch of soil alongside it.
They might be an editor, a peer, a cluster of collective thought, or even an “as-yet-unnamed sensitivity.”
Sometimes, the true spectator of a work is not the first person who sees it, but the one who is willing to find it several more spectators in the next round.
Standing here and looking back, I can see that I have been pushed from an extreme personal enclosure into a practice of publicness.
I am still not good at socializing. I still dislike small talk.
I still cannot glide from table to table at an opening, exchanging charm with everyone.
But I have started learning another way of communicating:
to speak through structure and text,
to speak through editing and arrangement,
to replace “How do I make myself visible?” with “How do I make the work visible?”
I have begun to believe that the simple fact of someone being on the road matters in itself.
Someone who is willing to design a more honest spectatorship for works,
someone who is willing to admit that works need spectators, and that spectators themselves are fragile, busy, and finite.
Someone willing to admit that we do not need perfect audiences; we need real people who, within the limits of their lives, can offer a work a single moment of full attention.
Once a work has been seriously seen even once, it has already formed an irreversible connection with the world.
Not as a perfect director or founder,
but as a creator who is still practicing how to face others.
I carry with me the instinct that once fled from small talk, and also those moments in dark theaters when I felt my blood grow hot.
I am trying to build a space where works can live a little longer.
If STRATUM is a way of mining vertical histories, then for me this text is also a kind of manual for practicing spectatorship:
How do we give a work more witnesses without sacrificing its complexity?
Can a work be allowed a longer timeline?
Can it be reactivated in different media, in different contexts?
Will someone be willing to walk with it a bit further?
The life of a work is initiated by the creator, but it is extended by spectators.
The creator gives the first sentence.
Spectators decide whether that sentence will grow into a conversation, or even into an unwritten book.
I often feel that everything I am doing now is being pushed forward by invisible seeds.
They have grown into what we now call ELSEHERE and STRATUM, but I still do not know what they will eventually become.
I only know that some people have already set out, and some works are already on the road, waiting to be seen.
Someone has to walk this road. So I went.
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