You Don’t Know What Love Is: Love Letters To KL

Love as Cholera 

A few years back I was mentoring together with K in a film-poetry workshop. He told the students how he first learned about poetry writing in his university years. His mentor told him that the poetry writing should pour out of you as if you have Cholera, it should vomit out, or come out as unstoppable diarrhoea. It has to get out of your system, and it will find a way to get out. K said he writes about 30 poems a day.  

At that moment I thought, falling in love is just like suffering cholera. “I love you. It’s none of your business.”  

Here I present to you a machine that can write 10,000 love haiku. Which is a simple program written with a few lines. A machine that can vomit out endless emotional haiku, as if a man suffering love, angry, in despair… I give it a name K.  

K is part of my Emotion Machines series. Even if K will not make you understand love. But let us ponder about love for a moment. 

— Tan Chui Mui 

Tan Chui Mui's emotion machines remind me of the uncontrollability and irrationality of emotions when a person truly falls in love. These emotions erupt sporadically, much like this machine that constantly spits out love poems. Moreover, the output of the machine is not one-sided; it is reciprocal. It forms part of an emotional transmission loop between the artist, the audience, and the machine itself. The three elements continuously switch roles between subject and object, completing this performance together. Perhaps the essence of love is revealed in these exchanges — a fluid state that cannot be fully captured. 

In this exhibition, although the artist employs completely different media for her creation, she continues her deeply personal reflection on emotions, present in her previous works. This is a machine with emotions, constantly and angrily expressing itself. However, I think the tone of this exhibition is gentle and playful. Just like the exhibition title suggests, no one can truly know what love is, but the moment emotions arise can prompt us to introspect and be inspired. 

— Lang Ji, Curator 

We always try to depict love, explore what love is, and try to enter. Artist Tan Chui Mui's love poem machine, after feeding the machine the artist’s unique and fragmented text, begins to vomit vast amounts of love poems into a container. As one approaches the machine and read these poems, the fragmented text drags the reader through the cracks and into a state of temporal “love”. 

Crazy, bitter, haggard, obsessed, sour, sweet, and so on. 

Come! And munch on these “tasty” love crumbs. 

— Bunny Tsai, Champochic Gallery