There always seems to be a quaint correlation between what is in front of my eyes and the thoughts I am able to have in my mind. I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air, but my consciousness was weakened by a number of other unrelated elements. I thought about the death of my grandmother, about an essay I was working on and about a misunderstanding from a friend… Every time the mind went blank, I locked my eyes onto a bird and followed it for a few seconds, until a new thought was ready to form, then I thought may be I should go out. Sometimes when feeling sad at home, I ride my bicycle in the direction of the central station. The emotions improve when parts of the mind are given other tasks.

 

Passing through a street, I stopped on the corner of a building and started doubting which way I would like to go. A woman with black suit passed in front of me, she soon stopped and locked her bicycle, then ran into the building. Later I saw a man walking out from the door with a lot of staff, and then putting them into a car. Just a second, following my eyes and unconsciously shooting their actions, it seemed making a one-second film for me. Now the person was not important, the street was also not important, I was just focusing on the time and movement. All of the anxieties in my head seemed to disappear slowly, and this feeling proved the concept about moving images could change the mind.

 

I often shoot partly because the photos can get things back and let me see things more clearly.

 

Later I walked into a small coffeeshop. It was dark and smoky place, with a line of beers standing along on the counter. There were few other customers in here. A woman with boyish face was idly rotating a teabag in a cup; a bearded old man was doing a crossword; a young man was eating a hamburger. No one was talking. I seated myself at a small wooden table in one corner and felt lonely. But for once, this was a gentle, even pleasant kind of loneliness, better than a happy and festive scene where I would suffer from a contrast between my mood and the environment. Taking out my camera, I started seeing the photos that I just shot and ordered them in an interesting way. Seeing the images passing before my eyes, they seemed moving, growing, changing and dying, and they live. They made me imagining the moment when I stood in that corner of the street, watching the things passing through my eyes and feeling my mood was slowly changing.

 

However, there were not nice images. But they seemed slowly telling me that the real images are not on the screen, but in the mind and heart of the person who has seen them; and the real material is not the camera, but the time and experience itself. It is something basic, something honest, and this is how the images alive. At the end of these hours I felt I have returned to myself.