離
departure

離 departure | THESIS STATEMENT | PING HO

 

What is departure? At this moment I do not feel a sense of leaving but rather one of departure. As I departed from my home in Taipei, a vibrant city in Taiwan to study in multiple cities on different continents in 2018, and now reside in Sarasota, Florida where I am going to graduate and leave. My journey from Taipei (Taiwan) to Maastricht (Netherlands) and the United States (Chicago and Sarasota) involves meeting people from all over the world; traveling around places of the unknown; leaving and saying goodbye to my surroundings. Being on this journey my whole life, I came to question What is departure opposed to leaving? Why do people decide to leave home, to leave family and friends, to leave where they used to live and belong? What does it mean to leave home for them and myself?

 

By disassembling the meaning of “leaving” through a series of historical and sociological research in my thesis research paper, The Cycle of Leaving–Leaving as a Way of Living, I have distinguished “departure as a planned going away from a place, while leaving is an unplanned going away from a place”. This linguistic exploration revealed the origins of these terms in the Germanic and Latin languages. While “departure” traces back to Latin Old French departeure, “leaving” comes from Germanic Old English læfan and German bleiben, meaning “to stay” in German, which oddly became an antonym root. 

 

“Leaving” can imply both going and staying, like leaving something or someone behind, while “departure” doesn't imply leaving something. This linguistic journey led me to choose the Chinese character “離”, which encompasses both the meaning of leaving and departure as acts of going away. I would like to embrace the custom of departure; possess the spontaneity and whim of leaving; and express the collective experiences on both concepts. 

 

In response to the concepts of leaving and departure, I produced and curated a body of works titled 離 departure for a Solo Exhibition at Savage Gallery. This exhibition uses a wide range of art mediums including audio-visual installations, mixed media sculptures, book art, site-specific, documentary photography, and interviews to explore departure as a universal human experience at different stages of life. 

 

As the curator and the artist of the exhibition, my intent is to welcome the audience to a curated journey that transcends the experience of leaving and departing as a traveler, a visitor, a nomad, a wanderer, a passenger, an excursionist, or a lover, a bereaved soul, and a human being, while inviting them to reflect on the profound relationships between home, places, things, people, and time.