The Great Wall / 長城

"The Great Wall" is a photographic series that reconstructs and reinterprets a specific boundary within everyday life. The narrative is anchored in my hometown of Linyuan, Kaohsiung, where a wall surrounding a CPC Corporation petrochemical industrial zone stretches for about one kilometer. Adorned with over 300 murals created by local school students and teachers, the wall depicts themes of environmental protection. Through site-walks and photographic documentation, I sought to rewrite the narrative of this industrial boundary and its ecological discourse from the periphery of the urban landscape.

I believe I may be one of the few who, after the initial fanfare of the project, have earnestly revisited and carefully studied each painting on the wall. Traditionally, a wall is perceived as a physical boundary, demarcating and narrating space. However, in this case, the boundary, once marked by the strokes of student painters, with every mural emphasizing environmental awareness, seems to deconstruct the original dichotomy of inside and outside. This transformation redefines the wall’s existence within the specific region, turning it into a unique interface that mediates reality, abstraction, and allegory.

By closely examining the images on the wall and the skyline it divides, two distinct realities are juxtaposed. To the observer, the scene appears as an imperfect overlay of two windows—reality stretched and split. This visual encounter forces a reconsideration of the landscape through a narrative that feels almost like a science fiction tableau, where the cracks and reassembly of reality are presented through an allegorical interplay of text and image embedded in the actual terrain.

This was once part of my everyday life.