User:JoeHK247/sandbox-Stephanie



"The folded order of the 'top' and 'bottom' systems are placed next to each other, compared, then mirrored, then compared, then overlayed - such operations were done in search for a stronger spatial and graphic understanding of hierarchy amongst the rectangles in the grid." - Book 27 NA 6665 M42

Story
She is a biologist teaching at Xiamen University who studies the Conchology of mollusks. Her research takes her to far away parts of the world to study a single species of gastropod. In different places, the same snails are called by different names. A slight difference in size, color, curvature and proportion of the shell distinguishes the Chinese Mystery Snail from its American and Taiwanese counterparts. Regardless of their appearance, the spiral shells align to a common mathematical formula; a system of perfection described by the Fibonacci sequence; a golden harmony of logical principles that have influenced the popular understanding of aesthetics since the Renaissance. But there is a discrepancy - an interruption in this spiraling model of perfection. An innocent turn, a flip and mirroring of a page - a simple act of disruptive symmetry: the shell made incomplete - an isolated member of a pair - like hands and like feet. The snail lacks these inconvenient extremities, but their shells exhibit an undeniable property of chirality. By absent choice they spin, mostly right, reaching towards the tip of a dextral coil.

She is left-handed - when she plays her grandfather's piano, the music notes her asymmetry - the Italian subscript shows mano sinistra. Sinister - she knows what that means but why? Bach's notes, his Well Tempered Clavier, God, and perhaps even nature itself holds a bias towards the right for what seems to be of arbitrary significance: a flip of a coin, an impulsive change of direction. She is an exception. There are over five thousand pianos on the two square kilometer island of Gulangyu but only her grandfather's is left-handed. The so called "Island of Music", whose hours and days are marked by the tick tock crash of the waves against the island reefs is just five minute ferry ride away from Xiamen. She visits the colonial villa where her grandfather lives among a mishmash of foreign architectural styles, remnants of China's first zoned international settlement, a more faithfully duplicated copy of classical European architecture that has the sought after aura of history that the newly built villas of the Chinese nouveu riche lack yet unsuccessfully attempt to emulate. She enters her grandfather's living room, approaching the mirrored piano. The sound of a chord in C sharp minor resonates with the breaking of the waves.

Her grandfather is a recluse. The steep hills and narrow alleys of the island keep him landlocked in his French chateau. When he leaves the house, he must walk by foot. There are no taxis, no buses, no cars or motorcycles - the use of motorized vehicles are outlawed on the island. The tourists come for the island's antique charm, the government laws ensure the island's imprisonment in its own displaced history. He is getting old and she wants to move in to take care of him, but she works too hard. Long nights in the biology lab, days lecturing to her students, and weekends that are all too short. Her job at the university tethers her to Xiamen. And recently she has been given another job.

Her five-minute ferry ride to visit her grandfather on Gulangyu is replaced by a thirty-minute ferry ride to Kinmen, through customs, to visit a heavily guarded fragment of an old book. The text is mirrored, right to left, written in Traditional Chinese characters. In the mid 1950's, when her grandfather was a young man, the People's Republic of China switched to a left-to-right writing and introduced an official set of Simplified characters. Like many, he had difficulty reflecting the direction of his writing and lost time learning the new set of simplified Chinese characters that were meant to improve efficiency. She confronts her grandfather's same problem in reverse. She grew up with the left to right simplified character system and now has trouble reading the reflected text of the book.

Her Taiwanese counterparts have less trouble translating the book. The government of Taiwan has kept the traditional set of Chinese characters and has only recently officially shifted to left-to-right writing. The fragment is translated from an Italian book whose language structure follows syllabic sequences that are right to left, up and down. The book has already been flipped multiple times. "In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize...Simplified Chinese is standard in the People's Republic of China, Singapore, and Malaysia. Traditional Chinese is retained in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and overseas Chinese communities (except Singapore and Malaysia)"

The book is a compiled series of correspondences between a Robert Swinhoe, a British naturalist that lived for some time in Amoy and a Confucian scholar from Xiamen. Their letters to one another are a continuation of a conversation on the subject of a particular book being translated by the scholar into Chinese, sent during Swinhoe's naval expedition around the Island of Formosa and later in his position as the first British Consul of Taiwan under Qing rule. The Englishman helps his friend properly translate portions of the book's Italian passages. The letters are interspersed with observations Swinhoe has made on his trip, like diary entries about species of birds and turtles encountered on his trip. He refers to his interests in ornithology and his interpretation of the book's text and form is clearly influenced by Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species in 1858. The exchange ends with a letter from the scholar's family announcing his death. Swinhoe leaves his post as Consul in Formosa returns to attend the funeral and assemble his friend's attempts to translate the book, publishing an edited volume of his work in Chinese along with an appendix that contains their letters to one another to some popularity and becoming the British Consul in Amoy.

With her background in Conchology and Chinese Semantics, she designs a system of classification to organize the book variations created to replicate the format of the original book.

(Her house is a shell, a reflection of her grandfather's piano, on islands separated by a short gap of water but linked by an aerial tram)