Sun and Moon
2019
Paperback
Self-Initiated Project
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power”
Lao Tsu
The aspiration is to gain self agency over the oppressive and coercive power. How might individual subjects recognise their own status and the conditions that dominate and shape them? And how might we proactively utilise this entrenched and stable part of ourselves for our benefit?
How does my culture consciously and subconsciously influence my design? How to learn, frame, and capture the Play Perspective in Cultures, and vice versa, how to utilise the Cultural Aspect in Play? The book attempts to answer the question in a reverse order.
The study of the I Ching and my interpretation of it is a big focus in the book for the I Ching has shared profound wisdom about mankind's place in the cosmos. It is probably the richest, most coherent combination of the intuitive and the rational human aspects ever to have been formulated. I am aware that my preoccupation leaves one half of the I Ching untouched. However, this project focuses almost completely on the rational, structural aspects of the work. This is a deliberate choice on my part and stems from two reasons.
Firstly, I believe that this aspect of the work has received little serious attention in the West, especially in the context of contemporary information theory. Most of the written material available is either historical, tracing the conceptual and textual development of the book; or presents translations and interpretations of the classical texts associated with the Gua.
Secondly, pragmatically, this is the aspect of the I Ching that I am best suited to address. The knowledge comes naturally from everyday life. The knowledge in the book is something Eastern Asian people attain intuitively, and my work here is only to reveal and re-contextualise the train of thought, in other words, the project is merely an internal monologue of an Asian designer.