01
“Language” Is a Gift
“I watched Arrival over the weekend and spent a long time alone with it afterwards. Few films have resonated with me so strongly. It was like a thread, tying many of the questions I have followed for years into a circle.”
Arrival
Writed by Richie Xiang
Date:
7 February, 2025
In the film, the aliens experience time as a whole, a continuous flow without before or after, beginning or end. They can see past and future at once. Their language expresses their way of thinking and knowing the world. Rather than unfolding word by word, their circular script gathers meanings into a single form; an entire message seems to arrive almost at once. As Louise Banks learns their language, she acquires their way of thinking. She no longer understands time as a straight line, and begins to see both past and future.
By contrast, most human speech and writing unfold in sequence. We lay out information word by word, one thing following another. This is also how we tend to understand the world and experience time: cause before effect, past before future. Our thinking can become confined to that single line from past to present to future.
Our knowledge of the world is limited by our senses and the ways we think. Language, as a means of conveying information and knowing the world, may be a gift that allows us to glimpse other dimensions. If language could break with linear sequence, how might our understanding of time and space change? If it could change our experience of time, might it also allow us to think from another dimension?
02
Transmission of Information
Language is like a thread running through time and space, weaving together many of the subjects that have long occupied me. Language exists because we communicate, and communication involves the passage of information.
For a long time, I tried to trace the ideas of media studies without quite grasping what a medium could mean. Only when I began to think about media through language did its deeper possibilities come into view. Language enables us to know the world and express our thoughts. Language is a medium; a medium can also be a language.
The natural languages we know, such as English and Chinese…are only one form of language. In the wider sense I am exploring here, language need not consist only of words and sounds. Sight, touch, emotion and even memory can become ways of communicating. Without them, how much of the world could we understand?
Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, which received the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize, gave me another way of asking these questions. Can a forest think? How do the people who live there communicate with the forest and other beings? What are their languages, and how does information pass between them? This perspective unsettles a way of seeing that places humans at the centre. In the forest, trees, animals, spirits and even medicines may be understood through systems of signs, carrying forms of thought and ecological relations that human words struggle to express. Information moves through a wider network of living connections.
John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds made me notice the things around me as media. How do we come to know what is marvellous about a cloud? We can see it with our eyes—the body; draw it with a brush—a skill; observe it through a telescope—a technology. Without eyes, brush or telescope, how would the cloud appear to us in these ways? Descriptions and records gather into a river of culture that flows across time and space.
Reading Peters leads me to ask: Without ships, would the sea remain as mysterious? Without fire, would nature seem as fierce? Without clocks and calendars, how would we experience time? Without writing, what would we know of ourselves? What, then, is the relationship between human beings and nature?
One thread I draw from The Marvelous Clouds is this: without media, existence could not appear to us as it does. The thought reaches further. If we could go beyond our media, would we also go beyond ourselves?
We often imagine technology as a means of conquering or remaking nature. Yet nature is not simply an object waiting to be changed. Technology can also allow it to appear in new ways, bringing possibilities into view that might otherwise remain unseen. Nature is a process in motion, and we participate in it.
A blade of grass, a tree, the elements themselves: all can become media. Weather, oceans, clouds, fire, bodies, writing… Weather is observed, measured and felt. It gives shape to an intricate grammar of life together: ways of breathing, experiencing and seeing.
Fire leaves its sound, colour, heat and smell upon you. As someone once put it, if we look into a flame for long enough, we may see the world changing within it.
We, too, are media. Like whales, human beings have evolved in relation to the environments they inhabit. Our bodies both reveal our art and give rise to it. Without us, how would time be felt? Time and the body are bound together as burning and flame are bound together: burning is how a flame exists.
At what point does a medium carry information, and at what point does it not? Any medium might convey a message, but it does not do so in every situation. During the Second World War, carrier pigeons carried intelligence; even the position of a window blind could become a signal if someone knew how to read it. In peacetime, the same things might convey nothing of the sort. What changes is the context and the way we look.
The same is true of art. Making art is a way for artists to build their own languages, through which they come to know and understand the world. To most people, an everyday object remains an ordinary object. Why, in an artist’s eyes, might it become art? The difference lies in how the artist sees it. Objects, materials and sensations become part of their language, a way of speaking with the world.
03
The Language of Art
I began to understand contemporary art when I stopped unthinkingly accepting other people’s explanations of it. I started instead from my own observation and perception, asking why these works exist and what lies at their core.
I might notice the mark on a stone left by a river, dividing the part long submerged from the part exposed to air. It makes me think of art as a particular way of understanding the world. To look closely at what is singular in one’s experience is also to ask what it means for oneself to exist in the world. Making art is a way of being oneself and entering into conversation with it. One’s doubts and struggles, thoughts and feelings, find their way into the work. I began to notice the material presence of everyday objects: their smallest details and the ways they affect one another. What history or feeling does a sound carry? How does it travel across open ground, and how does it sound beneath a bridge? Sunlight strikes the surface of a lake and sends rippling reflections under the bridge. I came to sense art as a conversation on another plane, a transmission that takes place through feeling, experience and energy rather than words.
My way of looking at art has passed through several stages. At first, I could not understand what I saw. Then I began to analyse works, trying to turn them into words and identify the ideas they might convey. Later, I started to look from the perspective of making: what materials an artist had chosen, how the details and joins were handled, what difficulties had been overcome. I tried to feel my way into the process of creation. Now I find myself attending more directly to the energy and emotion a work brings me, often without needing to speak. Looking can become a direct exchange. Through it, I sense the artist’s state of mind, their way of thinking and knowing the world, almost as if I were reading their mind.
In Conversations with God, I encountered the line, “Feeling is the language of the soul.” The passage goes on to describe feeling, thought and experience as ways of communicating. Thought often works through images; experience can bring a kind of knowledge that words cannot. Words come last. Because they stand for feelings, thoughts and experiences rather than being those things, they are especially open to misunderstanding. The passage suggests that words may help us understand, while experience allows us to know; where experience cannot reach, feeling and thought offer other ways of knowing.
That book made me pay attention to what I had often overlooked. I began to value my feelings, emotions, thoughts, experiences and memories. As I suggested earlier, a stray idea or a few half-formed words might be part of a conversation with something beyond the dimensions we know. Memory, too, can be a means of communication. A memory that arrives with a sense of déjà vu might even seem like a fragment of the future. Through memory, we try to understand what our experiences mean.
I have also come to think that one language cannot pass wholly into another. Something is lost in the passage. Art has its own language, and trying to convey it in words can feel thin and inadequate. Every attempt to speak across media or fields faces the possibility of losing something.
Making art is a conversation between the self and the world. It offers a way of seeing; meaning does not simply reside in art but is something we construct. Much of my thinking and practice as a curator now concerns how to bring these ways of seeing to light. How do we live in the world? What questions do artists face? How do they turn their making into a form of knowledge and lived experience of the world?
Contemporary art is diverse because we are diverse; each person’s experience is particular. What lies at its root may be very simple, yet it can be the hardest thing to understand. Studying art also helps us see that history is a constructed narrative, and that our own perspectives are always limited. If we can learn to understand different “languages”, perhaps we can understand more of the world.
04
Gift
Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” One night, I suddenly saw a question within that thought: if the dimensions of our language are limited, must our thinking be limited too? Physicists and astronomers have developed languages of their own for understanding the world. With limited information, mathematical signs and formulae, they try to describe and test the workings of things they may never be able to reach.
In Japan, Arrival was released under the title Message. I find that title remarkably apt. When beings whose languages and ways of perceiving the world are so different meet, how can information pass between them?
The Aeolian harp is a stringed instrument played by the wind. Air moves through it, setting its strings vibrating and producing sound. In the second half of the eighteenth century, as people increasingly connected their inner feelings with weather and the natural world, the Aeolian harp came to express a resonance between emotion and nature.
The Weather Series. David Hockney, 1973
Clare Milledge, A well at the bottom of the sea
Across disciplines, living ecologies and imagined multiverses, there may be many kinds of language. Bound by what our eyes can see and by linear ways of thinking, can we find a door through which to glimpse something wider? The question fills me with excitement and a sense of the unknown. Between rational frameworks and all the things we feel but cannot quite explain, something seems to flash.
JAMESPLUMB，The Weather SeriesStained Moons
Shilpa Gupta: For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit
In the film, the aliens say they are offering humanity a “weapon”. That weapon is their language. Language is a gift. In English, gift can mean both a present and an innate talent.
