In the summer of 2020, I met Jo on Instagram.

Jo has Chinese looks but doesn't understand a word of Chinese. He is gentle and polite man lives in Houston. Jo loves photography, he works hard and lives a simple life. We stayed in a long distance relationship for eight months until February 2021, we ended this relationship peacefully and resolved to face the more real life in each other's worlds.

 

The Vanishing Temperature is the culmination of my personal experience struggling with a long-distance relationship with him during the 2020 epidemic, which I never met . A psychological distance mirrored our physical distance. The emotions, as our sentiments towards one another waned, began to spur a physical sensation of an extreme change in temperature. The Vanishing Temperature intends to capture the internalized experience of this change as our emotions began to dissipate. 

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11,110 kilometres physically separated the two of us. Houston, Texas to Shenyang was only traversable through Facetime, Imessage, and other forms of communication that depended on technology. I could not feel him, his heat. Recollecting on the experience I recognized how the Chinese language uses words associated with temperature to convey love and emotions. In order to deconstruct my experience, and my feelings, I reimagined how to engage temperature as an artistic medium and bring my intangible thoughts into a visual form.

 

I dove into research concerning the Law of the Conservation of Energy. This principle states that within the natural world energy neither is created or destroyed, it can only mutate from one form into another. With this notion in mind, I created a heating and cooling system capable of reaching a high og 50 degrees and low of -15 degrees Celsius. The system then heats or cools the ends of a steel pipe that have been bonded with heat-conductive silicone and adhesive to optimize the thermal conductivity pattern.