Semisensory

A visual meditation on distant intimacies — relationships that are felt profoundly, yet remain partly out of reach. What began as a visual metaphor for dissociation and a blunted sense of experience, evolved into a story about relationships shaped as much by profound closeness as by their inherent distances. 

At the heart of the project lies the complex, layered bond between mother and child, characterised by a uniquely intimate connection, and also by its very severance. 

This metaphorical distance becomes literal in the artist’s own experience: for the past three years, all communication with his mother has been filtered through a screen, creating an additional layer of separation in which mothering becomes both figurative and technologically mediated. Physical absence, delayed touch, fragmented voice — all contribute to a sense of partiality. 

But semisensory is also about how care evolves in absence: the artist and his friends, all international students far from home, learn to mother one another in quiet, improvised ways. This reconfiguration of intimacy is both communal and fragile, grounding the work in gestures of tenderness and self-preservation. 

Combining still and moving images, the project explores this dissonance through visual metaphors that evoke this layered disconnection: arms reaching out, cheeks pressing to light, fingertips unable to connect, all gestures of affection that never quite make contact. Sensation here is partial — not absent, but dulled. The body thus becomes a site of half-feeling. 

But semisensory is also about how care evolves in absence: the artist and his friends, all international students far from home, learn to mother one another in quiet, improvised ways. This reconfiguration of intimacy is both communal and fragile, grounding the work in gestures of tenderness and self-preservation.