Do You Understand Me? II by Qianlin Wang published on 2020-12-03T06:51:12Z This is a performance between my partner Derek and me as another experiment on intimacy and if we truly can understand another human being. Dreams reveal our deepest secrets and desires where some of them are even unknown to ourselves. In this performance, Derek and I need to come up with our own methods to predict each other’s dreams. Derek proposed to use manipulative tricks on me during the daytime to trigger my nightmares, while I attempted to imitate everything he does for a day to access the unconsciousness. Both of the methods are proven to be futile. Derek dropped the idea for ethical reasons; I found imitating another even for a short period of time to be extremely challenging and gave up in the end. The audio documented our thoughts, process and results about this performance. Nonetheless, I realised that to be intimate and connect with someone, you don’t need to understand everything about the person, but simply accept them. We believe we need to understand someone to accept them is based on the belief that we will only accept someone if they are similar to us. Following this mindset, conflicts start because ‘they’ are not ‘me’. From this experiment, I found that acceptance doesn’t come after understanding, but before. We want to accept someone, therefore we try our best to understand them.
