The Projection of Return / 復返的投影

2017- 2019

In the coding of cultural imagery, the bridge often appears as a symbol of passage toward the unknown, the obscure, and the imagined future. It also functions as a mediator between reality and dream. Through this passage and this mediating space, we are able to locate the “other shore” and the “dream,” while also clarifying the position of “here” and “reality.”

Following this line of thought, for those who live in Taipei as sojourners, Taipei may be the “other shore” within this cultural symbolism. The passages that connect reality and dream are the bridges linking Taipei City to its satellite cities and towns. These seemingly neutral sites, operating within the rhythm of everyday life, are in fact places charged with political implication, though such implications are concealed beneath the surface of the ordinary.

Yet once day and night are reversed, the other shore indicated by the bridge is no longer Taipei, nor dream, nor any form of desire. It becomes instead a temporary shelter in a foreign place, and a homesickness directed toward one’s place of origin. At that moment, what becomes blurred may be the road called “home.”

In everyday reality, a bridge is intuitively understood as a passage, a means of connection. It seems to connect regions, classes, and political territories with an appearance of equality. Yet this is not entirely the case. Between cities, the bridge plays the role of an entity attempting to cross boundaries. At the same time, however, it also ruthlessly, coldly, and almost precisely points to the kinds of people and communities who need bridges as a medium for crossing territories: mobile laborers, rural-to-urban migrants, workers, urban marginal figures, and others. Through the pressure difference produced by capital as a force of attraction, people travel back and forth between New Taipei City, its satellite towns, and the Taipei metropolitan area. These movements across the bridges connected to Taipei constitute what we call everyday life.

The identity of the stranger becomes increasingly clear through these daily crossings. Through this seemingly neutral and equal mediating passage, that identity is projected onto the body, onto emotion, and onto the city.

In 1990, Lim Giong’s song “Marching Forward” loudly proclaimed the dream of Taipei. Nearly thirty years later, Taipei, to a certain extent, remains a dreamlike existence. At that time, it was an era of economic prosperity, when effort seemed to promise hope, and walking forward into Taipei City marked the beginning of dream-seeking. But today, do those who enter Taipei still stride forward with ambition? Or are they more like Cheng in Lin Sheng-Xiang’s song, riding a Fengshen 125 with loneliness and uncertainty?

When Taipei becomes the other shore, the dream within cultural imagery, does this also imply an almost cruel fact: that between reality and dream lies a named chasm? Through bridges, one after another, we are able to make the two temporarily overlap, only to be forcibly separated again. Overlap, separation, overlap, separation—an endless repetition that takes place within every day. This dynamic relation is summoned into the everyday, becoming one of the most realistic, yet also most illusory, pages in the landscape of daily life.

“To drift with the current is the only permitted mode of movement for the individual within this field.”

And yet, to drift with the current is also a promise of reaching the other shore.

The movement of individuals between day and night constitutes the back-and-forth motion between the edge of the city and what lies beyond it. This is everyday life. As the site in which the everyday takes place, the process of return becomes a field where trajectories overlap like swift brushstrokes, written into disorder. The afterimages of individuals are continuously projected, moving back and forth between this shore and the other shore, endlessly and without interruption. For in the process of movement, no one truly remains.

Nor are they allowed to.

Through a dashboard camera, I recorded my own trajectories as I crossed and returned across the bridges connected to Taipei by motorcycle, as well as the mechanical back-and-forth movement of several specific bridges. Using the same mode of movement, I traced the geographical edge of the city as the background layer of The Projection of Return. I extracted myself from the immediacy of daily life, taking the position of an outsider in order to re-project the projection of the everyday, refracting and scattering the constructed daily condition.

The angle of refraction is produced by the pull between my multiple identities in reality: being situated within the everyday while desiring to escape from it; attempting, within the path of escape, to open another route back toward the everyday. Faced with such a contradictory split of identity, it is impossible to stand in a purified position or role. One can only search, within a state of tension, for a momentary position from which to stand.

Accompanied by the rattling sound of the motorcycle, I drifted continuously between the inside and outside of the urban edge, from Tamsui to Xindian. Through this unstable condition, I momentarily made the trajectory of my movement appear on the boundary of the city. For a brief moment, the discipline imposed by geographical space and my own perception of space were fractured. It was a state of numbness. Toward the end, I almost entered a trance, feeling for no particular reason that I was simply swimming between two shores. At that moment, space appeared to me as transparent and homogeneous, while I passed through it with a self-imagined freedom, drifting out from the everyday, then dispersing and losing focus.

A kind of spatial sketch.

In reality, the everyday landscape is drawn by individual commuters. From a distant perspective, the different narratives of individuals overlap and become a form of universal speech, a narrative of the everyday. This shared and homogeneous everyday forms the outermost layer of The Projection of Return.

Return. Projection. Everyday life.

I regard the everyday as a path, attempting to summon from the overlapping image that which deviates from the everyday: “madness.”

“The situation was urgent at the time, and preparations had already been made to blow up the bridge…”

“On the morning of January 21, 1964, Chao Chih-Hwa arrived at the First Armored Division of the Army stationed in Hukou Township, Hsinchu County, to conduct the annual inspection of equipment. He toured the camp and inspected weapons and equipment. Division Commander Hsu Mei-Hsiung and Deputy Commander Hou Fu accompanied him. Chao asked to inspect Deputy Commander Hou Fu’s equipment. Hou took out his pistol and handed it to Chao. After briefly handling it, Chao loaded the gun and held it tightly in his hand…”

The 1964 Hukou Incident was a fuse—one concerning bridges, and also one concerning madness. Until 1996, for more than thirty years, military police were stationed on Taipei’s major connecting bridges because of this incident. What kind of experience was it that made the boundaries between cities become so hard, cold, and rigid? The boundary between city and city was faintly transformed into a boundary between the nation and what lay outside the nation. A closer look at the map makes it easy to understand that these bridges, completed one after another—such as Zhongxing Bridge, Zhongzheng Bridge, and Zhongxiao Bridge—were all routes pointing directly toward the lifeline of the state. Under the tense social conditions of the time, their sensitivity was perhaps unsurprising. Yet after the military police left, that altered boundary seemed to undergo another transformation, lingering like a ghost on bridges that are no longer guarded today, watching over people and vehicles that appear to move freely.

This fuse detonated a terror related to national politics. What shattered was the warmth of the everyday. In the end, madness was summoned, and the everyday was reconstructed.

Once a transformed “national border” had been clearly identified through the presence of military police, it seemed never to fully abdicate its position, even though the armed military police on the bridges had long since disappeared. More than twenty years later, these events are now merely historical episodes occasionally mentioned over tea or drinks, scattered anecdotes at most. Yet the boundary produced by the presence of military police did not leave with the soldiers’ footsteps. Instead, it has remained in place in an even more rigid and invisible form. The image of the military police has become blurred, while the surveillance and examination of the soldier and the state apparatus have turned inward, becoming an invisible ghost directed toward the self: a biopolitical question of identity.

Up to this point, the “everyday” repeatedly mentioned in this text has referred to the habitual, neutral, and narrow sense of everyday life. But the everyday described from this point onward is no longer a purified adjective or reference. It is an organic composite formed by politics, terror, madness, habit, life, and “the everyday,” only finally covered with the mask called everyday life. This everyday is the condition that truly reflects and corresponds to reality. Certain forms of madness and terror that seem to deviate from the everyday are in fact the nutrients that generate it. They feed one another in a symbiotic relation. Madness, everyday life, terror, and politics are not separated by the boundary we imagine.

The Forgotten River begins from the everyday of the present, penetrating and analyzing it through a series of overlapping comparisons and dialectics concerning everyday life and madness. Here, the everyday plays the role of a bridge, a path toward madness. The video loop composed of dashboard-camera footage moving back and forth across the bridges at the urban boundary becomes the driving force that opens this dialectic, causing the individual to deviate across different dimensions of the everyday and to re-project reality through a state of refraction.

In this project, the everyday plays the role that the bridge performs within everyday life. The bridge, in turn, identifies certain aspects of the everyday. In The Projection of Return, the bridge is also an alienated political field, a carrier that detonates madness, and a medium haunted by ghosts. These are, precisely, fragmented reflections of the everyday. The everyday in relation to the bridge, and the bridge in relation to the everyday, establish a structure of mutual role-playing within this context.