Recent Work > Where we begin and end

How do we identify that which is ourselves and that which is not? Where do we begin and end? Where does one truly locate oneself? These questions are trickier than they seem. The hair on my head is me as much as my left eye, my hip joint, or the soles of my feet. But when my hair falls off, detaching from my body in the shower, on the pillow where my head tossed and turned the night before, or between my fingers as I run my hand through my hair, it instantaneously becomes disposable, unsanitary, repulsive. It is no longer considered to be a part of me. Its physical makeup has not changed, merely its connection to what I identify as my body.

What of our skin, which is composed of around 1.6 trillion cells, 500 million of which we slough off into the world each day? These dead skin cells populate our environment, our bodies dispersed in the corners of our bedrooms, floating in the air that we breathe in and out, absorbed, expelled, reabsorbed, and re-expelled. As I continue to live, I continue to shed material that is me into the world. I consume materials to sustain the process, Christopher Lin as process—an unconscious, unscripted performance. My body breaks down into hundreds of millions of pieces as I rebuild it from others, consuming the flesh of other organic beings and incorporating it into my own. Between each day, each moment, I am of a different composition. The balance of materials that make up my body, my identity, with each inhale and exhale, with each drop of sweat from my brow, adjusts and changes. Perhaps I am just the average of all these variations, or I am the sum. Such is the paradox of being—the boundlessness and the indeterminacy of the individual.