Information

By Nick Kleis

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Where do they go? is an intervention examining the role of private experience in public spaces. Where do they go? is a burlap sheet with twelve sentences written in faded acrylic paint. The text is mostly from the popular idiom for the “coming of age” narrative Catcher In the Rye, by J.D. Salinger: “Where do the ducks go in the winter?” into Chinese. Throughout the Chinese sentences are English words, translating their Chinese equivalents.

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The work itself focuses on absence, both in physical suggestion and metaphorically with the text. In this piece I wanted to work with varying elements: translation, uncertainty and travel. The translated words force the English speaker to move throughout the work, searching for clarity. And at the end of the journey, one comes away with a question. This has been my coming of age experience. We “come of age” when we go to college, yet it is not epistemological; rather our endpoint is the beginning of another journey, a question of where to go next. In this fashion we are all wanderers, or游子.

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In this work I drew inspiration both from Salinger’s own influence by Zen Buddhism and its connection to the Chinese language, and Jochen Gerz : Future Monument.  Gerz use of text appropriates the monument form and allows the work to be both a site of mourning and of expecting. With Where do they go? I hope to achieve a similar experience, where the piece stops the viewer and allows them to navigate its textual labyrinth.

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