Gallery Entry
But Not Him
By Felix Cheong · SG
In a familiar Singapore public housing flat, a woman struggles to pull her husband from a laptop as his body is absorbed into a stream of binary code and language. The words dispersing from him come from my poem “Who Are You?”, which asks what remains of identity after the stories we tell about ourselves begin to fall away. Her declaration—“You can have his words. But not him.”—draws a boundary between language that can be extracted, reproduced and recombined, and the human being who cannot be reduced to his output. She is not rescuing his writing; she is rescuing the person whom writing only partially represents. The work places the seemingly abstract question of artificial intelligence within a domestic relationship. Against the machine’s ability to process his words, the wife possesses another form of knowledge: memory, intimacy and care. The artwork asks whether creative work can ever contain its maker—and what remains human once our language has been separated from us.