PROJECT NAME. ACCURATE

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

There is an idiom in China called "Jing hua shui yue". It means the flower in the mirror and the moon in the water; it originally refers to the flexible and unpredictable artistic conception in the poem, later used as a metaphor for illusory and ethereal. The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" puts forward an eternal topic for mankind, and people begin the process of knowing themselves in their gaze. In Plato's cave metaphor, people rely on the shadows reflected in the cave to recognize themselves. Narcissus fell in love with himself through his own image in the water. In Lacan's mirror image theory, "I" confirms the self by examining the "me" in the mirror, and the self-gaze in the mirror image obtains narcissistic identity, just as the baby is obsessed with the ideal image in the mirror. "Mirror image" to people is like "reflection in water" and Narcissus, it is an ideal and illusory "self". This "self" exists in the imagination, but is the narcissistic image formed at this stage. Between the "viewer" and the "watched", the party with power is often the subject, and the party without power is the object. The "I" constitutes a complex subject-object relationship through its examination of the "I" in the mirror. "I" can never see myself. If I see myself through the "mirror", it is already a "virtual image", and this "identity" is also a “self-misunderstanding".
The whole scene reproduces the starting point of my daily self-observation. This is the scene where I look in the mirror when I get up and brush my teeth every day. The mirror in the sculpture part is composed of two mirrors that are perpendicular to each other. It can produce three images at the same time, and the images on the left and right sides are the same as those produced by ordinary mirrors. The virtual image in the middle and the ordinary mirror image are horizontally flipped with each other, that is, the vision of the self in "reality" is restored. "I am accustomed to seeing the self-image in ordinary mirrors. When I see the mirror image after flipping, I have a strange emotion about the self-image." On the one hand, the strange image in the mirror illustrates the vagueness and uncertainty of the subject "me". The denial of "I" to myself makes the rationality of "I" itself questioned. On the other hand, through the imaging of the mirror image, "I" has met myself again. What is it to be oneself, at one with oneself, or truly representing one ’s self?
Mirroring is a form of identification. In Lacan, the object of identity is the shadow placed in the mirror, while in Baudrillard, the separation of subject and object, the object of identity is the object. In life, the object is the current society, and the identity completed in the mirror is the identity of social behavior and knowledge. Identification is done in self-construction, and internalization of external things is identified to guide one's own actions and thoughts. Identity is an inseparable relationship between the self and the world. Understanding, perception, and memory are first constructed from the outside world and then returned to the words of people talking about their lives, then to the image of people's identity, and then to the ideal effect of constructing reality. So it fell into: a cycle of identification - division - verification - identification. The mirror image is the intermediary in the cycle, not physically but psychologically. It is our self-constructed desire for the external expectations of desire as the ideal self.