Here I propose ventriloquism, not as a stagecraft, but as a standpoint to a relationship among artist,

artwork and audience. Unlike the believers of mystic religious practice of ancient ventriloquism,

where diviners would imitate the departed spirits, intelligent yet guileless contemporary audiences

know the old tricks too well. Hence I envisage this perception could be whimsically defied if the

ventriloquist’s dummy itself is what actually speaks to audiences, or the words come from neither

of them, but elsewhere on the stage. Yet, despite these alterations on the stage, the audience’s

attention is still on the dummy’s mouth on his master’s hand.

​

The artist as a ventriloquist is perplexed when his or her work becomes voluntary in itself beyond

the role as the one in control, or when the number of dummies or the number of works within a

project grows, as the ventriloquist loses track of which dummy is performing which voice. From

my project that weaves fictional anecdotage about a fisherman inspired by Robert Musil’s

unfinished novel The Man without Qualities, I witnessed the myriad of components evolves by

themselves without my authorial intrusion. Is the artist the one who ventriloquizes the voice of an

artwork, or his or her culture or spirit the where voice from which an artwork speaks? I also

question whether the works themselves ventriloquize each other.

​

Through this audio-visual piece, I hope to provoke a question on a very orthodox notion that what is ventriloquized

as the work of art stems from the artist. The ventriloquism among artists, artworks, and the audiences that have evolved from a

deluge of information and intercultural ideology is eccentric, and a beautiful mess.

​

J.A.

​