《Human》 begins with a question about how we perceive a single world and how we come to believe that perception to be reality. In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, there is an idea that if time does not truly exist, then the distance we believe exists between the present and eternity, suffering and happiness, good and evil, may also be an illusion. What matters in this idea is that two states that appear to oppose one another may not necessarily exist as separate entities. We divide before and after through time, distinguish here from there through position, and perceive a single subject as different states. Yet these distinctions may not exist within the subject itself. They may arise from our own position and experience as observers. This idea takes physical form in 《Human》 through a series of translucent folding screens. Each panel carries silhouettes of mountains and trees. When the screens are fully opened, these images form a single landscape. As the screens begin to fold, however, mountains from different panels overlap, creating another landscape that did not previously appear. As the viewer changes position, the relationships between the overlapping panels also change, allowing completely different landscapes to emerge from the same work. Yet the images that exist there have not actually changed. The mountains simply remain where they are. What changes is not the mountain itself, but our position and relationship to it. A single landscape contains the possibility of existing in multiple forms at once, while we accept only the form visible from our particular position as reality.  

Light reveals the same relationship. Neither the sun nor the moon is directly depicted in 《Human》. Yet when light passes through the translucent screens, we imagine the presence of the sun. When the light disappears and darkness arrives, we imagine another time and another presence. Even without seeing the sun or moon directly, we believe in their existence through the changes occurring around us. The same is true of time. We cannot see time itself. We only perceive that time has passed through the movement of light, changes in shadow, and transformations in the landscape. For this reason, the overlapping screens and shifting light in 《Human》 are not simply devices for producing new images. They reveal how the same existence can be experienced as different realities depending on the viewer’s position and surrounding conditions. A contradiction emerges within this condition: the landscape changes, yet remains unchanged; different landscapes are one, while also being many; the sun and moon are unseen, yet they exist; time is unseen, yet we experience it. Through these simultaneously existing contradictions, 《Human》 asks whether the reality we inhabit truly exists as a single, fixed form. The way we place good and evil, happiness and suffering, the present and eternity on opposite sides may also be a distinction created by our position in space and time. Just as the same landscape appears differently when our position changes, the states we understand as contradictions may simply be different appearances of a single existence. The landscape within the folding screens continues to change, but the mountains have been there from the beginning.