Transparency

“There is a male artist… He lived for a period of time in a big box made of glass so that other people are able to see through and know what he is doing inside that confined room.” This is the part of the discussion I caught between Ms. Smith and other students last week in class while I was working on my painting. To be quite honest, “pervert” and “weirdo” were the two words for that female artist as well as for people who would like to watch him that came up to my mind at that moment. However, I started to understand this when I was watching other people playing squash in the other day.

As an audience, I was no different from those people who had watched that artist. On the one hand, we, people who are outside of the box, are interested in find out what is going on in that small space. This is the point where the wall made of glass plays an important role; the transparency allows us, the audience, to look through. On the other hand, we enjoy the fulfillment of knowing everything of that limited space and the sense of being omniscient. We suppose that they do not know about us as much as we know about them since we gratuitously believe that the world we are living in, contradicting to their small boxes, is too big to know well. However, the fact is that there is no difference between the people inside and the people outside. As soon as they walk out of that space, he squash players and that artist both live in the same world as we do. It is just the matter of the transparency of the wall.

My point is that we, mankind, are all living in a confined world. But the walls that confine us are too transparent to realize and see, or we have gotten used to live with limited space. Unlike the squash players and the artist who clearly know where that transparent exit door is, we do not. The path of escaping from the stereotype as well as from this “imprison” is almost extremely difficult yet still possible.