When I first went to London, I was totally amazed by the range of people there. I come from a relatively small city where never being stuck in a traffic jam is part of one's identity. Hence the huge escalators in the underground stations fully packed with people were already a spectacular scene for me. Those people went through their underground journeys so effortlessly and casually as if finding yourself in a sea of people as irrelevant to your life as it gets but equally subjecting themselves to the necessary but tiring long travelling time is the most normal thing ever. I was also pleasantly overwhelmed by the great diversity of human faces that I got to observe. Extraordinary ethnic diversity inside a single tube carriage. Yes, I like enormously this superficial feature of a human being: not even the cultural background behind one's skin colour, simply whatever it is about one's appearance that expose the race she belongs to. I even started to exoticise myself after moving to the UK: enjoying how beautifully Asian I look in the mirror. I was sitting in a London tube and admiring people's faces, each of which became more and more gorgeous as I keep looking at it. I didn't enjoy them just as instances of a race. I came to truly believe that if I look at a face long enough, any random human face, needless of any interaction, I will grow to truly love, even be obsessed with that face.
Then and there, in the London tube, I had a desire to preserve and communicate my feelings of being overwhelmed and exited about the diversity of faces. I wanted to put faces in a museum. Statues? Will statues of faces be human enough to convey what I want to? I have a habit that whenever I see a human statue, I would immediately turn my head in the direction of the statue's look and then for a heartbeat feel genuinely confused as there is nothing to keep looking at. Right, hyper-realistic sculptures or models of ethically diverse human faces would do the work. Seemingly ordinary black, white, Asian, male and female,.. faces until you look at them enough to experience what I did in that tube.
I also used to want to have a museum for all of the moments in my life that I have forgotten - especially the boring, insignificant everyday things: brushing my teeth before bed on 23/05/2012, another lunch alone in a dining room in my old school,.. I felt like each of them deserve preservation and recognition, not just being sadly crammed in my unconscious mind. It would be a metaphysical museum that needs not be visited by anyone, even me. God forbid, if I am to experience these moments in the museum from a first-person point of view, they will turn into memories rather than forgotten moments. How likely is it that seeing vivid images of one's past, even if they are just unimportant activities, will not bring them out of her unconscious, thus ruining the purpose of the museum?
Maybe I should do Museum Studies for my Masters. If I don't get funding for my ideas, I will steal money from my hopefully rich husband and set up some museums or exhibitions that are weird but nothing remarkable. I will be a bitter person with a depressing career life, but secretly enjoying my unrecognised works. Sounds like a plan.
*the title is from a song I'm listening to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQpTtYj52ts.
