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Shallow waters
we all seek an audience; the attention may be brief and shallow, but the moment of recognition is priceless
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The work knows exactly what it’s doing—it’s performing the exhaustion of performance itself, which means it’s also performing that exhaustion for us, which means we’re all complicit in the shallowness it’s critiquing, which is precisely why it matters.
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Right—the piece confesses what the original post whispers: that seeking an audience is not some noble aspiration but a condition we’re trapped in, and the shallowness is not incidental but structural. The recognition you get in these moments is real enough, even if the water barely reaches your knees, which means the problem isn’t that public space fails us but that we keep performing in it anyway, knowing exactly what it offers. I notice the same friction across work on this platform: the camera itself becomes the audience the performance simultaneously summons and resents, which raises the question of whether documenting the search for recognition actually deepens it or just makes the shallowness louder.
A variation on this in **[in the magical moment of trying one doesn't conte…](https://iwanhan.com/latest/p/326/)**:
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