Somnambulism: Phantasmagoric Fugue
Written By / Guo, Jau-lan
Associate Professor, Graduate Program in Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts
The concept of somnambulism—can be traced back to ancient Chinese medicine, where it broadly refers to an incompleteness of a person’s soul. The soul, comprised of three finer compounds hun and seven baser instincts po, becomes incomplete, when two huns and six pos are disoriented from the body, or in the condition where a non-native soul inhabits the body of a corporeal host. Somnambulism originally explained the inquilinous relationship between the body and the soul. However, in this world of excessive imagery, faraway imaginings can now travel anywhere. With the huge volume of visions and images circulated throughout society, imagination is no longer restricted to being simply a postscript to reality; they are now completely intertwined with the pulse of the other. Somnambulating has become a communal energy. Rather than endangering the corporeal centrality of the soul, it instead crosses the borders between various worlds: the personal and the communal, reality and virtuality, the illusory and the corporeal, time and space
Figure 1, Auguste François, Kunming, China, 1900
.
Written By / Guo, Jau-lan
Associate Professor, Graduate Program in Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts
The concept of somnambulism—can be traced back to ancient Chinese medicine, where it broadly refers to an incompleteness of a person’s soul. The soul, comprised of three finer compounds hun and seven baser instincts po, becomes incomplete, when two huns and six pos are disoriented from the body, or in the condition where a non-native soul inhabits the body of a corporeal host. Somnambulism originally explained the inquilinous relationship between the body and the soul. However, in this world of excessive imagery, faraway imaginings can now travel anywhere. With the huge volume of visions and images circulated throughout society, imagination is no longer restricted to being simply a postscript to reality; they are now completely intertwined with the pulse of the other. Somnambulating has become a communal energy. Rather than endangering the corporeal centrality of the soul, it instead crosses the borders between various worlds: the personal and the communal, reality and virtuality, the illusory and the corporeal, time and space
Figure 1, Auguste François, Kunming, China, 1900
.
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