I’ve been asked to “explain yourself in one sentence” but keep getting “it’s not specific enough” all the time, being asked to explain again and again about the detail. I’m 100% sure I can explain each piece of my work in one sentence, but being specific about myself is almost impossible and paradoxical.
I just realized this only situation when people doesn’t ask for more than one sentence is that they’ve know the person really well or the works have already been famous, or it’s not text-explanatory cause art speaks in its own language. If you see those banners of famous artists, none of them is up to the criteria of “one sentence clear definition” and as I know most of them just don’t make the definition. If you say “yeah this sentence are pretty clear”, check yourself and see if you are already familiar with their works or you’ve had their long-long bio in your subconsciousness.
Based on my observation, it seems to be some obsession that mostly exists in academia, that the whole system teach people to believe that creativity is a linear evolving process and a person only do one thing in life. This also come along with the “predict and go” “creativity”, that people spend most of the time write, prove and debate on ideas even without getting hands dirty. In that case, people believe things can be one sentence first and follow a preset guideline to realize this sentence. Well it actually works in some circumstances but generally just when people trying to start a brand or company, which has a clear goal for a period of time. But, how can you say yourself is pre-defined and have a predictable development in later stages of life? From when?
If I do write only one sentence for myself, my concern is that, I need ambiguity of this “one sentence” that give enough blank space for the unfinished part of the language called “art”. This kinda feel like the way art challenges and asks questions about everything but not giving a solution or answer, cause it doesn’t need to. If you force me to do this “one sentence self-description”, mine would be “googoogaga”.
One sentence definition doesn’t work, it can either be none or more and more sentences. I kinda realized it recently while I’m trying to dodge stalking on social media. I hide everything on my instagram, and unexpectedly I feel freedom – not just because they cannot trace where I am, but also I’m empty, empty enough to contain all the possibilities. I talked about this with my friend, saying if I show my page to someone new in an artist meetup, they will question and explore what I do by themselves, and that’s the magic of emptyness. People always build up a specific expectation, when there are only a couple of images, or only one or two types of content like some “repetitive artists”, and when things go beyond that, they unfollow you – that’s one of the biggest risk of “having a one sentence definition”. I’ve experienced that in the early stage of my funny vid content producer life (around 2015) and when I switched my “definition”, I lost 50% of my followers and most of the remainings just act dead after that. For myself, involving so many different stuffs and exploring with my own vision and ideas, using one-sentence definition feels more like a way of limiting myself – and it becomes extremely dangerous when this definition is not only bound to you but also bound to business.
Over-explaination just doesn’t work, unless academic papers. That’s also why I now believe evidence-based prediction and research doesn’t work for initiating creativities – such type of words only come after, not before. In a lot of artist interviews they say “from a very early stage I’ve been xxxxxx” “since childhood xxxxx”, which makes people feel like they’ve already known what their later life will be at the very beginning. But how can you say yourself is pre-defined and have a predictable development in later stages of life? From when? Hey, isn’t it also tragic that a person’s life and art are predictable?
The root of the story is that – it’s just a phase, and life is a cluster of phases and aspects. My life goes on and myself change from phase to phase. If there is one sentence for each phase, and these “one sentence”s would be a cluster – just like “how do you describe a piece of cloud” this cluster is an ever-changing collection of YOUs – can you really summarize it with one sentence but specifically define what I am? Yes I know! Maybe one sentence doesn’t work but I can describe it with one word! Let’s call it by “googoogaga”!
