To be anything actually
means to be nothing...

Do you want to feel (and look) younger?

It is 10:30 in the evening. Instead of sitting in bed with a book, chilling your body and brain for the calm night to come, you are sitting at your desk, rocking back and forth in an old chair. A few more times, and the frame will finally give in to your weight. The trembling seat is already creaking, and you are wondering when it will fail to hold you and you will land on the floor. At your age, that can end with more than just a bruise.
And yet you keep on swinging. This allows you to focus your thoughts on the content that is passing before your eyes, as you scroll through one of your profiles and ads pop up between your friends’ updates.

We are looking for twenty women over 40 who want to change their lives and feel younger. / Five home remedies for the tired eyes. / Can't concentrate, your apartment and work look like a battlefield? ADHD prevents you from enjoying and relaxing? With our app, you will get rid of hyperactivity. / If you haven't tried it yet, calisthenics may be the answer to a healthy and beautiful body / … Forget the content for a second – the sheer excess of imagery invading your personal space is exhausting.

The same feeling of being lost and fatigued haunts me as I watch the first part of a two-channel piece ‘A Manual for Timeless Youth’ by the artists Minkyung Choi (South Korea) and Weng San Sit (Singapore), in a collective screening shared with three other female friends working in the art-related field. It is one June evening, and we enjoy spending time together, although each one sits in another place in the world. Most of us tune in from cities like Berlin or Amsterdam, where the summer heat exhaustion is to be dealt rather with wine or spritz, than by a refreshing, healthy walk in the nature.

Coming back to the piece—it begins as a true tribute to the beauty manuals. The fast-paced editing of the video cleverly influences our feelings. The production seemingly addressing womanly beauty is presented so convincingly, that one can easily feel a need to remember its content, or even to take notes while watching (and some of us were!). It seems to entail an intricate, holistic approach to the ‘secret of youth’. Inclusion of scientific themes and visualisations makes the manual even more credible. It feeds on humans’ incapability to critically evaluate the information served to them as science-based truths in various sorts of communications, including product ads and treatments. Overwhelmed with the quantity of information, we are unable to verify its quality. The pressure and amount of information push us to see the narratives as scientifical facts.

Inequalities of bodies and societies

It would not be too much of a spoiler, if I add the main narrative voice is in fact one of a man. Artists used the structure formula of the ‘instruction’ to demonstrate the transition and the materiality of the body. Surely, the issue is predominantly a women ‘problem’, which is why artists intentionally chose male experts as those reinforcing the main male narrative, alienating the recipients from the narrator. The interesting point voiced through the choice of the specialists is also that they were to great extent not only men, but English-speaking personas from the western culture. It may suggest as to where the artists point at, when talking about the origins of the ageistic attitudes in cultural norms.

But the ‘Manual for Timeless Youth’ is not only a tale of a human thirst for youth. I mentioned Berlin and Amsterdam in the first part of the text for a reason. At some point the instruction’s reference to human bodies gets overlapped with a narrative about two cities—Seoul and Singapore—both with a never-ending ambition to be the very best examples of thriving, ever-young metropoles. The fact that both have colonial pasts makes a resonance with one moment in the movie presenting the ice-bath taken by American and Asian men, the former in an exclusive, Manhattan-looking roof-top bath, the latter—in an inflated pool.

Nevertheless, when we think about those cities, even if at one point Seoul’s or Singapore’s development was driven out of inspiration taken from western metropoles, today it is them that serve as an example of modernity that European or American cities aspire to. Contemplating that, one of us referred to Cheonggyecheon water stream restoration project in Seoul. During the course of the city’s expansion, the stream was put underground and instead of water, the city was flown by asphalted highways and cars. But after years of learning that there is no number of roads in the world big enough that will ever suffice for the vehicle pressure, the city leaders opted for the stream’s restoration. Not long after the project was completed, it became a renowned example taught at the European universities as a success city-renovation story, one that almost couldn’t be matched anywhere else. While this distant look rubs out the underlying issues, smoothing out the gazer’s understanding of a space (and at this point we had another thought—maybe showing yourself only from a distant point is also one of the rules for reaching youth?), the video gives viewers the possibility to get a closer look, which will always reveal the local tensions, in case of Seoul and Singapore risen from, among other, constant pressure for novelty and success.

(Old) age as an advantage

The video skilfully builds up the momentum of our trust in the manual’s instructions up to the first breaking point—a moment of one of the protagonists’ refusal of the truth being sold. But then it happens, like a first smudge on a smooth surface, a tiny crack on the wall, or—to remain with the bodily metaphor—the first glimpse of a wrinkle by your eye. The two artists stand up to the narrative, offering their counter-stores, appealing to their own personal experiences of aging and physical sickness. While our reality is still occupied mostly by the cult of the youth & beauty, ‘A Manual for Timeless Youth’ reveals the value in aging and its attributes. It speaks in favour of ‘getting back to the wisdom of the older’. As artists state, to restore the youth means also to destroy the memory embedded into your body. People erase the past and personal experience that their bodies hold, all in expectance of being still open to countless possibilities, without the burden of your age’s weight. Everything has its price though and to remain intact also means to repel wisdom and to avoid acceptance. One of us viewing the video refers the artwork’s message to a podcast ‘Wiser Than Me’ by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. In it, the actress interviews 70+ women about their life and achievements, basing the talk purposely on their age and how it positively affects them. Older people are generally not relevant to the capitalistic thrive for never ending energy and success. And yet, there’s a quality of living among and with old. A social meeting in the Singapore cemetery portrayed in one of the scenes reveals the meaning and importance of continuity.

The permanence of the acceptance mindset

 
Most of us participating in the screening reached the ‘no one is getting any younger’ stage of our lives. Watching the video, we had nothing else in our hearts but a praise of the artists’ mindset of spreading the wisdom of the experience and age. Nonetheless, the question remains open—is the acceptance of the consequences of ageing already a fixed wisdom we possess, or is it rather just a chapter related to a specific life situation, that may change in the future? One of us articulates it, ‘As I grow old, I am less and less interested in the novelty and newness. In my head I lack experience rather than youthfulness. But I am wondering if maybe it’s only a phase that I found myself in—passing the edge of 40’ies recently, maybe I still don’t feel old enough to be longing for smooth, unwrinkled face or the privileges of the Young? Will I try to be 25 again when I turn 50?’ You can only live it to know it.

The focus of the work relies on the fact that the contemporary culture pushes the individuals and whole societies (here portrayed as cities) to constantly regenerate in terms of their bodies and potentials, in a way that they remain unified (thus also easier to maintain and/or please?). The video further alludes to how the mainstream culture also excludes old age from being present in the public sphere, pushing oldness and its attributes out of the everyday life, making us unaccustomed to the aging process. Nor to dying, for that matter. The circle of life goes only half-way, we remain young, until we are no longer in the picture.

Two culture associations came to our minds again. The classic ‘Picture of Dorian Grey’ by Oscar Wilde portrays this mindset, where the issues and ugliness remain hidden away and are not being dealt with, as if we would be able to remain untouched by it by the mere fact of ignoring it. In opposition to colonizing the aging process in situ, internally, Dorian Gray makes his physical and mental faults colonize a hidden space. Does it ring any bells? The gruesomely gore movie ‘The Substance’, where the contemporary Dorian Grey is played by Demi Moore and her younger ‘self’ Margaret Qualley, shows not only the external pressure women face in regard to their physical appearance and the unachievable beauty standards, but also self-violence women exert on themselves in order to remain ‘firm and fresh’. The old and nasty gets kept locked in a wardrobe, out of sight and out of mind.

The Dead has to go somewhere

People portrayed together with the cities and with the genetically designed “prescriptions” in the ‘Manual for Timeless Youth’ can be understood as machines to be treated excluding their individualities. At the same time the city’s morphology matched in a poetic narrative with human body and processes gains an emotional, animated side. The movie instruction actually treats the body as a structure that can be moulded, shaped, and designed with novel bioengineering tools and substances. And the gentrification processes make the cities mourning spaces. Can the cities be seen as women, with their ‘bodies’ objectified and abused? For sure, the metaphor of the city-organism goes only so far—while we eventually fade away, the urban tissue gets cyclically renovated.

Nonetheless, even if you try to cover up the dirt, it will stay somewhere. Where does the decay go? It either stays invisible around you, hidden under a mass of layers of newness, or moved over to another space—like in the case of the Singapore’s old cemetery removal imposed for the new development to take up its space. As one of us watching the video said, ‘we are in crisis of the Old coming through the seams of perfection’. We all have to face aging. The Dead has to go somewhere.