Human Dream

This piece was inspired by Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream: Zhuangzi dreams that he is a butterfly, then poses the question of whether he is a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. I wanted to tease this question through arranging pictures of my face with prints of a butterfly, depicting a spectrum of realities in between. Imbuing the piece with an ethereal quality yet also intimacy through pictures of my face, I wanted to communicate the extreme relevancy yet also mystique behind the question. How real is conscious experience? Why does it even occur? Zhuangzi’s question feeds into the hard problem of consciousness that continues to elude humanity.