THIRTEEN
CASE ANALYSIS (5)
BOOK 1
It's natural to fear death, yet a person and death are never present at the same time. Besides, despite the effort, we humans are unable to understand the essence of death. 未知死 is a tiny book aimed at illustrating “death does not concern us”. The idea is illustrated through the book’s tiny size — a metaphor of how little death matters to us. To convey our inability to understand death, the book is designed as an object of expression rather than a readable book. It includes a collection of images extracted from book 2 焉知生, with effects added to make the images look unrecognisable. It would not make much sense reading it, just like glimpsing into death — you would not gain or understand anything.
Death is inevitable. As the only animal that became conscious of this fact 150,000 years ago, human beings have developed different mental and behavioural defence mechanisms to manage the terror of death — denial, avoidance, or a change in perspective.
Martin Heidegger believes we are “being-towards-death”, while one could only live authentically by confronting and making meaning out of their own death. The concept of this work is to oppose and juxtapose the notions of life and death through the use of visuals of everyday life, implying that death is not directly people’s concerns, but life needs to be recognised as a celebration of details. This work does not aim to provide answers on the notion of death and life, but a different way of seeing.
BOOK 2
焉知生 aimed at emphasising “what matters is where we choose to assign values into for our finite life”. Contrasting with 未知死, 焉知生 is a large book. The books’ difference in sizes is a metaphor for the differences in how life and death matter to us. 焉知生 is a readable book that people could interact with, just as how people could interact with the world while being alive. The book contains a collection of images about everyday life: little things, mundane things, details — something that could be recognised and understood. The number of pages is 72 — a round-up number of the average life expectancy at birth.
THE TWO BOOKS
The two books could be read together by placing 未知死 inside the hole of 焉知生, revealing the whole picture of the images. Reading them together is a metaphor of acknowledging death as part of life and knowing coming to terms with death is the only way to live authentically, while reading them separately can be interpreted as a way of living that only emphasises on living experiences or avoiding death (ignore the hole in 焉知生) and death is an unknown.
CONCLUSION:
The interesting point of this book is that it is a collection of two books. The two books explain the theme from two perspectives, and the way of insertion is very special. The layout of the whole book is interesting, the pictures have strong visual effects, and the style is uniform.
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