To Knot Is to Hope
Waiting Under the Knotting Tree – Performance Still 结绳树下的等待 —— 行为表演静帧
EN:
Wood branches, knotted rope, stone with handprints — staged as a set to echo Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The artist sits, embodying the absurdity of waiting.
CN:
树枝、结绳之网、带有手印的石头——布置成向贝克特《等待戈多》致意的舞台场景。艺术家坐下，亲身进入荒诞的等待。
EN:
This photograph is part of a durational performance staged inside the installation Knotting Tree. By sitting quietly beneath the rope-net “canopy,” I consciously reference Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where waiting becomes the very content of existence.
Here, the stone bears the traces of my earlier labor (pushing the rock, leaving handprints), and yet the act of sitting suspends all action — it is a paradox of life: we labor and mark the world, yet we are also asked to wait, to pause, to endure the passing of time.
For me, this work explores existentialism not as despair but as attention — to sit and feel time stretching, to notice the dust in the air, the subtle movement of smoke, the sound of my own breathing. It is a refusal to let life be reduced to productivity or spectacle; the waiting itself becomes a form of resistance, a quiet insistence that being present is already meaningful.
CN:
这张照片是我在装置《结绳树》内进行的持续性表演的一部分。我坐在绳结网状“树冠”下，直接呼应塞缪尔·贝克特的戏剧《等待戈多》，让“等待”成为存在本身的内容。
这里的石头保留了我先前劳动的痕迹（推动过的石头、手印），而坐下的动作则暂停了所有行动——这是一种生命的悖论：我们劳作、在世界上留下痕迹，却也被迫等待、暂停、忍受时间的流逝。
对我来说，这件作品探索存在主义并非作为绝望，而是作为感知：坐着感受时间被拉长，注意空气里的尘埃、烟雾的微微游动、自己的呼吸声。这是一种拒绝让生活沦为生产力或景观的姿态——等待本身成为一种抵抗，一种安静的坚持：仅仅存在，就已然有意义。