PARSONS CHALLENGE I

i'm aik shin. a malaysian-chinese boy who just had a taste of absolute freedom and the price to pay for being a human. i live for music and friends, but i don't expect them to. for the past year i was in the states doing an exchange program. the freedom was great, but the responsibility learned was tough. if it's one thing that i've overlooked, it's the short-livedness of things, i.e. our mortality. i left the first work unfinished. a constant reminder that as humans, we have no control of when our time of death is. you maybe walking by the streets and get hit by a car, trip on something and stab yourself with the cutlery you got from the cafeteria counter. anything could happen, anytime. my inspiration was bach's last unfinished fugue, contrapunctus XIV, from die kunst der fuge. however a genius he maybe, he is still human. leaving a great masterpiece unfinished. it stuns me to listen to the piece, and it just ends like that. we all are guests in this world. when the time comes, we all have to go. there is no exception. our short lives cannot come close to being a point in the whole timeline, yet what a persons makes during this miniscule dust of time, that makes a difference. some will be remembered till eternity, some forgotten forever.