A Wedding Story

Wedding invitation, drawn by Duan Jianyu

Editor Notes

Everyone has his or her own idea about what a wedding is. The “wedding” in this book may more resemble a drama. It hopes to become “that” wedding which everyone shared and enjoyed, and thus the names of the bride and groom no longer matter – we will rather call them Z and H in this book.

The story of “A Wedding” begins in Hong Kong. One day, Z and the artist Lee Kit were having a chat. At the time, they were attending many weddings of artist friends and it occurred to them: a wedding is a special moment in one’s life, so why couldn’t it also become an opportunity to gather artist friends together in order to share experiences of being alive? Both works of art and presents are vehicles for expressing our souls. At this moment in life, what kind of gifts would artist friends give? What is the relationship between presents and works of art? In turn, what kinds of reality would these presents give rise to?

Excerpts

“Today is special. May 26th. It always begins in the wee hours. This time, I attempt to punch holes into the rolling of time. Then throwing these shapes into the distance, all hearsays, hark and narration, constitutes time itself again. Digitized time, is an ambiguous public axis. What is attached is complex, self-multiplying, is the world everyone lives in. A hole, two holes, are all in passing. In the hole, there is light.”

－Zafka, Tumblr homepage on May 26th

The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift, is time. But the gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting—without forgetting (l’attente—sans oubli). It demands time, the thing, but it demands a delimited time, neither an instant nor an infinite time, but a time determined by a term, in other words, a rhythm, a cadence. The thing is not in time; it is or it has time, or rather it demands to have, to give, or to take time—and time as rhythm, a rhythm that does not befall a homogenous time but that structures it originally.

－Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), P41.

Contents

PROLOGUE  11

INVITATION  17

THE GIFTS  33

THE SKETCH OF THE MIND  257

EPILOGUE  287

Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2019

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