BUT IT IS A STRANGE REALITY
Written and illustrated by Shao Ni
Unpublished 2022
21x14.8cm
"Past life regression is a method that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations. The practice is widely considered discredited and unscientific by medical practitioners, and experts generally regard claims of recovered memories of past lives as fantasies or delusions or a type of confabulation."
The messages I saw and felt in my past life regression are identical to dreams, yet I was fully awake.
While I know the scenes are illusory, the feelings, emotions and memories are undoubtedly real as I literally experienced those memories through the regression, making them even more intangible than dreams.
The project is a visual response to The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, aiming to represent the bizarre experience by combining the texts based on my voice recording during the regression, and illustrations made of found photographs representing other people’s languages.
A photograph is generally considered more real than a painting, but its realism could be altered completely in different contexts.
