Ten thousand faces

”The Tao creates one
One creates two
Two create three
The three give rise to ten thousand things.”

Tao Te Ching

In this most minimal of all creation myths given in chapter 42 of the Taoist base text, ten thousand is the number used to denote infinity, a massing so great you cannot count them or envision them as separate entities. We live in nations of millions, but our minds are still tuned to dealing with people in dozens or hundreds at most. Go past that and our senses are blunted. One million killed in massacre. Ten million starving. These are meaningless to our hearts. We need that picture of one woman holding her skeletal baby, the running girl with napalm burns, to get engaged with the tragedy. That is how we are built. In a world of millions of this and billions of that we deal with everything one at a time. And get stressed when presented with ten thousand of anything.
Well, my exhibition is your chance to deal with ten thousand individuals – or rather ten thousand squiggles hinting at them – one at a time. You get to leaf through one hundred binders holding one hundred pages each and commune with their joys and pains.