Category: Thought

Let me start here: I met Hao in the smoking area of Heaven when I was abandoned the people I was there with who were hooking up in some dark corner. Bam, immediately having a horrible time. So I turn around, 18 and lost ^._.^ฅ, and in a moment of benevolence (in a beacon of light like the angel Gabriel) Hao said,

Alright, here’s a flavoured Marlboro.

That was top 10 most swag things ever. And being a Libra and a Pisces combination made us such a sociable pair. Come to find out, he also makes sick art.

So, look, I suppose at the beginning I didn’t understand art very well, I’d never really been into installations. At that point I was still a little hatchling and only had developed an appreciation for traditional media when it came to visual art (at this point, I was legging it to the National Gallery every day to stare at The Execution of Lady Jane Gray – clearly, I was unmedicated). The first time I truly understood installation art, or even modern art at all, was with Hao’s work.

If we weren’t in the club, we were at his exhibitions. It is wild to think now his work is exhibited in galleries across the UK, in Berlin and in Paris, though in my head it always was going to work out this way.

A piece I really like is Amor Fati. This is the artist statement for it:

“[Amor Fati] explores the trajectory of people in the city and the arc-shaped repetition that comes with cyclical life, as people move from one starting point to another. The concept of human desire for purpose and the quest for satisfaction is gradually optimised into an endless arc of social compatibility. At the point of zero on a given stage, there is only a brief pause before the cycle begins anew.”

I know when art is good or bad because I’ve never been wrong in my life. I think the ability to perceive the nuances of your surroundings with such a precise little scalpel and make something as comprehensive and defined as Hao does, is tremendous. When I see the movement of Amor Fati, I perceive my own stagnation in cycles of repetition within urban life, because theoretically it looks just like the arc the installation makes.

There is a clear style in Hao’s body of work. Any creative knows that style takes a lifetime to develop, that it encompasses one’s lived experience. I believe Hao’s personal style directly mirrors his art. Or rather, that his installations are an extension of him. In a room full of strangers, I could match this artist to his art. It has always been this way; I have never known Hao to not be sure of his identity. And this is so powerful as an artist because art can never be devoid of the vessel that produces it. An unsure person will make unsure art.

One of the first pieces I ever saw in person was The Oracle of Oppression. It addresses such a relevant topic – the connection between artefacts and humans – that when I saw Hao engage with it in his degree show, I felt that his artistic style had such clarity of meaning that I lowkenuinely felt enlightened. I have no artistic vein in my body for anything but writing, which I would argue is really easy to convey things through (a dying sentiment in the age of AI), so I take this ability for granted in other media. Hao is just crazy style locked in (professional art critic review language btw). Also, how many people do you know doing performances with their installations? I felt extremely cool just being there.

I think when you are outside the art scene, you don’t realise how ground-breaking and novel some work is. It is astounding to witness interdisciplinary media we are so rarely exposed to, even in an age of overconsumption.

The summer after we met Hao was the only person I saw. When I meet people, I grasp at reasons to dislike them, reasons to keep my precious untouchable little world secret and intact. I get reclusive and cagey like a scared cat. I find it hard to like people. Even with all my scrutinising I couldn’t find fault in Hao’s heart of gold – which is an extremely cheesy and weepy thing to say but it’s true. Drinking vodka (or maybe rum) mixed with milk in his old apartment, throwing up in his bed in his new apartment (I’m so sorry boss). The nature of our friendship is like that which I have with Hannah, a serendipitous strike of luck and fate.

It’s said that you’re the average of the five people closest to you – I sometimes look around me, at the five people closest to me, and I am astounded and speechless at the brilliant minds I am surrounded by, the kindness. Sometimes I am silly, and sometimes I am too ill to even consider the possibility of existing successfully. In the end, there must be something good there, because the wonderful people that are close to my heart are creatures of infinite love and compassion.

i was the youngest patient waiting in st. thomas’ hospital endoscopy unit that morning, three days after christmas, an emergency sunday booking. my mother, who knitted beside me, was the second youngest. after donning a hospital gown that would disintegrate in a light breeze, i sat alone in the second waiting room with my leopard print slippers. at this point, i had not had food for nearly twenty-eight hours, and my last sip of water was seven hours ago. they hadn’t even deployed the fentanyl drip yet, but i felt high. i started to cry without knowing why, and sent lucía selfies of my heinous hospital drip and intravenous cannula. she made sure to comfort me with many a picture of kush the kitty, and instructed me to throw my younger brother at my older brother, which was incredibly helpful. then i was stowing my phone and slippers below the bed, four of us in the small room, and god above, there were so many wires. someone gave me banana-flavoured numbing spray for my throat that tasted a whole lot like pure absinthe, and i was pushed and pulled and straightened out for the first endoscopy.

less than a month before the Scary Procedures (the bite of ‘87, if you will), my test results had returned abnormal and i was placed on an urgent suspected cancer pathway for colon cancer. i am not exactly a stranger to chronic illnesses, but up until this point, i had been branded with a big fat question mark on what exactly i suffered from. this was no longer a question of making accommodations for strange symptoms and chronic pain, but a quick escalation into pre-surgical triage and colonoscopy preparation appointments. it was christmas time, and i was in a state of muddled confusion. to downplay the Happenings was silly, and a little performative – double colonoscopies and gastroscopies at 21 are not exactly commonplace. but to take it seriously and soberly felt like an acceptance of what was, at that point, unknowable and terrifying. it also implied a tinge of guilt. i was not yet labelled with any diagnosis, and i felt like to worry about it was dramatic and sympathy-seeking. yes, it’s a little stupid. especially as i had suffered the same alarming symptoms a year before. now i know there is no mass in my colon, it provides a small sense of relief. still waiting on my small intestine MRI, though, so watch this space.

of course, the physical manifestations of my mystery illness have had a significant impact on my life. however, i do believe that experiencing such a swiftly alarming Horror had a more potent effect on my way of thinking than anything else. instead of being preoccupied with essays on the Alienfranchise and surveillance, i spent a lot of time reorienting my body in my world; there was a newfound awareness of its fragility, i think. it was the recognition, within myself, that something was wrong and i hadn’t been overreacting in thinking so. now, being referred back to hospital for further investigation, there is still no clarity as to what’s actually cooking inside there, if you know what i mean. it is hard, sometimes, to admit that you need help and that you are sick, and i realised i had been chastising myself for my fatigue instead of believing myself.

but this kind of reflection on the body hasn’t just been limited to myself. yep, you guessed it, i’m pivoting into the political. why is it that images of illness and suffering are so easily swept aside in places like Palestine, or Sudan, or Iran, or Lebanon? Naomi Klein refers to locations like these in Doppelgänger as the ‘Shadow Lands’, the understory of the gleaming capitalist dream. crucially, she underlines the fact that these spaces of exploitation, brutality, and even genocideare not random one-offs: “not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run”. i sometimes struggle to grasp how and why this is dismissed in favour of “oh, i’m not into politics”, when the UK government has played such a heinous role in the Palestinian genocide, for example – perhaps it is simple when it is limited to a phone screen documenting atrocities from far, far away. does it not upset you to see 22-year-old activist Umer Khalid unable to walk, refused bail, and denied medical care for his muscular dystrophy? all while imprisoned in Shepherd’s Bush? how much closer can it get for people to care? while i may require a lot of medical intervention to remedy my condition, i have access to it, but others cannot say the same: the global suffering we see without access to free healthcare should not be something to be complacent about (magically even if it doesn’t directly affect you!), be angrier.

o god, i’m the world’s biggest hypocrite. i have a zine, i lecture the omnipresent you, dear reader, on my personal philosophies. in an era in which anti-intellectualism is rife and entire departments of education are being slaughtered, that is not what i am here to say. there is a pervasive strain that is invading our lexicon of “what if the curtains are just blue?”, with no inherent meaning behind anything. but there also exists a desire to overdetermine our culture to sound as philosophical as possible. i think this especially irritating in the case of the politically inactive, but fear not, all will be divulged.

this begins with a tiktok from user @eugbrandstrat, who makes the incredibly salient point that knowledge is becoming the ultimate status symbol, the idea that identity is loosely triangulated around exclusionary references in culture and media that the person invoking has no real connection to. i have contemplated this in my piece on the performative male. it is becoming a signifier of status to gesture vaguely towards the possession of the capital of knowledge, when financial and economic capital is shifting: both in the skyrocketing costs that pervade spaces like london, and in the way privileged individuals are no longer signifying their wealth to dominate the social hierarchy. instead, you will hear many a claim that “i’m not posh, it’s just that my family is comfortable”, or “i only ski once a year, i’m hardly privileged”. i couldn’t possibly comment on whether this has been said to me. teehee. as theories of class consciousness infiltrate gen z, there lies the denial of one’s access to resources (rather than feeling attacked, i think it may be more beneficial to educate oneself about wealth inequality, coming from a person with greater proximity to capital relative to the state of the world). in the wake of this, intellectualism evolves into another way to signify capital. it is also imperative to me that i posit the fact that education within our societal structures is exclusionary, and access to this is incredibly dependent on monetary and geographic means. in a few cases, access to knowledge can be a subtle tactic of investigating another’s relation to class, or demonstrating one’s own: par exemple, latin is not widely taught in state schools. inch resting.

my powers of prophecy are not here to critique the process of creation or commentary – it is beautiful that such philosophising is more readily accessible than ever. rather, it is the unwillingness to engage with theory beyond what it can offer as social and cultural capital, and the political ignorance of some who posture as thinkers. if there is an entire lack of desire in engaging with the political, but no qualms in weaving elaborate thinkpieces around complex ideas, is this merely a smokescreen that does not reflect one’s thoughts, or even a text that aims to generate social validation rather than interrogate anything meaty? i think this a particular shame in my faculty of arts and humanities, in which theory is our bread and butter. once again, i couldn’t possibly say if i have observed this personally. the image of the intellectual is key, to be seen as one who thinks. i have seen many point to examples of surface-level video essays that do not truly engage with the subject at hand, or analyses littered with buzzwords. do not be fooled, this is Nuanced – the more interrogative work that is done around critical concepts, the better. it is when knowledge is wielded as a tool of social currency, a simple regurgitation of current discourses and framed as revolutionary, that we stagnate. i think it intriguing to read this as a possible form of virtue-signalling if such intellectualism is used as an embellishment. it may come across a little disingenuous if the statement “i’m a white woman, but don’t worry, i’ve read angela davis!” is simultaneously accompanied by a disinterest in any real and direct activism to protect the rights of people of colour, or an inability to not centre whiteness in conversations about race.

this resurfaces in the tool of the debate, something that has exploded on social media in the last two years. perhaps my view of this is biased because when debating cancel culture in front of my entire school, my opponent declared that cancel culture was stupid because harvey weinstein has made great movies, apparently. thankfully i was able to channel my rage into my tattoo appointment after. i’ll leave you to stew on that. right-wing figures such as jordan peterson excel as pseudo-intellectuals due to their intent to sound philosophically superior, regardless of the truth of their statements. i point to this with the context of the deputy leader of reform, richard tice, having been invited to king’s college london by our very own politics society, not forgetting later inviting the founder of the german far-right party AfD. you can extrapolate my feelings on this, but the reason i introduce this is to play with ideas around intellectualism and politics. if we frame spaces of intellectual thought as stages in which all must be heard out, hate speech has entered the chat. pseudo-intellectuals who peddle their own rhetoric under the farce of educating and debating students don’t just want to win people over by persuasion, but also use the turnout of these events to prove the validity and intellect of their ideologies. have you considered just googling their policies instead of showing up? shocking, i know. this is why it is genuinely important to engage with social and cultural critique beyond a quote in a substack article: so that concerning trends can be identified, and maybe even an original thought can be formed.

beyond this though, we are all eager to say something, and i do wholeheartedly believe that this is overall for good. i think that, most of all, we deprive ourselves when material is not fully explored. it is worth noting that this is not just cultural capital, but also generates financial capital – many podcasters and cultural critics are making thousands from clicks and misinformation. the fundamental crux here is ignorance and superiority: i’m sure we’ve all met that one guy who loves feminist theory but treats the women in his life like shit. to return to the tangtang niche of modern desire, this can and has been wielded like a weapon in friendships and relationships alike. (Lucía commentary: men that have never read or seen or listened to woman-centred media and theory but steal talking points from ex-girlfriends to manipulate other women into thinking they engage with this media and theory… many such cases). even if you genuinely read and understand sedgwick, dworkin, wynter – it means nothing if an undercurrent of misogyny pervades how you treat your girlfriend and your insatiable need to intellectually dominate her. likewise, one can have read a hundred books on class critique, but if one still refuses to fully grapple with their privilege, i fear no one gaf. yes, i’m so aware of the irony in writing a thinkpiece on thinkpieces. stay humble and quote nietzsche less, you are not rust cohle.