Failed File
2025.05~2025.09~2025.11
1. It was a project I began in May and titled “Froth of the Day,” but in the end it was a failed work. I washed my hair every day with the old shampoo my maternal grandmother frequently used while she was alive, growing my hair until the shampoo was finished, and then cutting it again. To make an everyday ritual. It feels as though the everyday reveals her existence through her absence. After my grandmother passed away, I never once encountered that scent again anywhere. After a long time, I bought a bottle, and the moment I opened the cap, the scent came back to me.
Sometimes I miss her; sometimes I want to be comforted; sometimes I want to experience my grandmother’s everyday life. And when someone smells that scent and becomes curious, asking me about it, I want to share my vulnerable, private project with them. I think anyone who comes close enough to ask is someone I can tell.
Sometimes I miss her; sometimes I want to be comforted; sometimes I want to experience my grandmother’s everyday life. And when someone smells that scent and becomes curious, asking me about it, I want to share my vulnerable, private project with them. I think anyone who comes close enough to ask is someone I can tell.
2. This work began due to various motives, and it was interrupted and failed due to various motives. When I tried sorting through the materials again for the project, it was confusing—like a jumble of sleep talk. Poorly organized plans, diagrams repeatedly revised as I tried to anticipate the result, the cover I made when I wanted to bind it as a book (a photo of the back of my head), a gentle diary, the dream where my grandmother appeared and I woke up crying, conversations with ChatGPT, small secrets written in a memo app, a photo of me cutting my hair at home around September. Even the introduction to the project can only remain in fragments.
3. One of the reasons I couldn’t properly finish the work is perhaps the obsession and guilt I feel toward nature. I keep having to rethink everyday life, rituals, and the work itself. The moment I recognize it as a work, everyday life goes up onto a stage—it becomes a kind of performance, purpose, intention. And once I am conscious of it, every gesture becomes inevitably unnatural and altered. I feel sorry toward my grandmother. Yet I believe she would still love and forgive me.
4. But unexpectedly, performance, intention, and practice can also become natural everyday life at some point. Sometimes, when I walk home alone in the evening, there comes a moment when I suddenly remember that I used that shampoo in the morning—realizing that I am, in fact, still in the middle of the project.