1,080,000 Seconds examines the gap between what we desire and what actually happens in our lives, from everyday expectations and a work culture that exalts productivity, to the identity we believe is ours and the successful life we have pictured for ourselves. That gap is always present, and desire is often turned, without our noticing, into a measure of a life’s worth, by others or by ourselves.
The artist found that frustration builds from trying to close this gap and reach a perfection that exists only as an image in the mind. The harder we try, the wider the gap grows, or new gaps appear, until we realise the day we fill it will never come.
The exhibition enlarges this gap into drawings of “time,” following the principle of “one second, one line.” The drawings total 300 hours (1,080,000 seconds): one hundred one-hour drawings, standing for the small hours of life we let slip by, and twenty-five eight-hour drawings, together 200 hours, the average time a Thai person spends working in a month.
No two drawings are alike. A special technique on paper makes the ink of each line incomplete, catching in places and failing in others, in ways that cannot be controlled, corrected or predicted. The perfect image we imagine never comes into being; there is only the imperfect reality in front of us, second by second, one breath at a time. The everyday blue ballpoint pen stands for ordinary modern life, and also for the institutions, from school and workplace to business and the state, that set the standards we live by and expect output from us, often without our seeing them.
Rather than trying to fix that reality, the work invites viewers to embrace each imperfect moment with kindness, to accept the impermanence of things and let life take its own course. Accepting the gap may be the first step towards releasing ourselves from expectations we have unknowingly drawn around ourselves, and towards living with understanding and a hope that fits reality.
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