RECALL THE PAST / 思古幽情 

In August 2016, I traveled with a group of friends to Kangle Community in Hsinchu, where we lived for a period of time. After exploring the people, culture, and stories of the place, I was startled to discover that it functioned, for me, as a mirror reflecting my own hometown—in its geography, its cultural landscape, and the transformations it had undergone.

It is somewhat embarrassing that it was only while staying as a guest in an unfamiliar place that I became so acutely aware of my own identity. Fragments of scenery that had gradually faded over the course of my life were reconstructed here. It was an experience of loss—a journey of piecing together the contours of my own face within an unfamiliar landscape.

Kangle Community possesses a distinctive history and cultural landscape. Because of wartime needs, mainlander veterans were introduced into an area originally inhabited by Minnan and Hakka communities. Yet this miniature military settlement differs from the military dependents’ villages with which we are generally familiar. It originated from no more than a single company headquarters and later expanded slightly into the scale of a small settlement.

What first drew my attention were the deteriorating single-story houses situated nearby. Perhaps because several veterans and their families still lived there, the place retained a sense of warmth. To an unfamiliar visitor, it did not project a cold or alienating distance. Instead, it invited one to approach, to become closer, and to attempt to trace its cultural and historical context.

What ultimately compelled me to leave something behind for the place was its impending redevelopment. Perhaps this would not constitute a full stop or the final chapter of its story, but it would, at the very least, place a pause within its historical trajectory.

This impulse did not arise from a desire to debate whether preserving Lianbu Village was just or necessary. I merely wanted to document it from the position of a passerby.

After all, within the wider region, it is an exceedingly small presence. Perhaps one day it will indeed be redeveloped or demolished. When that happens, there may at least remain words, images, and other traces of its existence. A group of passionate young people had already formed a workshop to research and organize its textual history. I, too, attempted to gather the materials, stories, and cultural textures of the place, leaving behind, in the name of art, a trace of its having existed.

This series of works will eventually be returned to the place from which it originated. There is little meaning or legitimacy in a passerby holding on to these stories. Everything associated with Kangle Community, Lianbu Village, and the days I spent there will naturally remain within me, following my footsteps as I continue to drift from place to place.

Yet to insist on keeping the physical objects and stories would amount to little more than affectation. Let them return to their roots. This was my original intention.

The series consists of several components: paintings, moving images, sound, physical objects, and a fabricated text. I seek to extract an intermediary state between the place’s present and its future, using it as the foundation for examining a text that may eventually be overwritten.

Within the narrative of the work, I have predetermined both a position and a future history for the place. The hypotheses, possibilities, and uncertainties described above become established facts within the work. Its former context—the context that once existed—has already been scattered and rendered unverifiable.

In its place remains only the nostalgic reverie of a literary-minded passerby contemplating a handful of surviving images, while the place’s actual text has long since disappeared into the slow current of time. By that future moment, the history of a place will have been abruptly severed, leaving behind a crystalline vacuum, so transparent that it will appear never to have existed at all.

It is merely an act of mourning, is it not?

I used interviews with residents of Lianbu Village as the source material for the sound installation and moving-image work. In these recordings, several elderly veterans, speaking in strong regional accents, recount stories from their youth. I regarded these accounts as the original text of the series.

Within the video, transcripts of these audio recordings were placed in a blender and reduced to paper pulp, which then became the material support for a new text. I repeatedly recorded and played back the decomposition and regeneration of these documents.

Once these materials, texts, and contexts have been broken down and reconstructed, can their original forms still be recognized? Or will a new history soon be imposed upon them with ease, allowing the past to fall into an undisturbed sleep?

Through this destructive form of textual translation, I hope to awaken something—or perhaps to sound a warning.

I do not deny that the position I have adopted toward the case of Kangle Community is profoundly pessimistic. In reality, the circumstances of this place are far better than those described in the work. A group of young people has devoted its passion to nurturing this land and attempting to do something for it. For any place, this is an extraordinary form of good fortune.

Yet throughout Taiwan, there are countless places and countless stories that lack such resources. On an otherwise ordinary day, they may silently fall away from the course of history, ultimately losing even the right or qualification to be mentioned and remembered.

Even the most ordinary story, or an event that appears insignificant to outsiders, may constitute the collective memory of a particular community or settlement. I believe that the authority to speak about such memories should be returned to the locality itself, rather than belonging to officials or those positioned at the centers of power.

And even if such attachment appears self-indulgent, so what? It may well be the landscape most privately cherished by a place. What right do outsiders have to pass judgment upon it?

Every place may, either now or in the future, become subject to disruption and fragmentation as its environment changes. This is an almost inevitable process. Dissolution and reconstruction form part of an entirely ordinary cycle.

Yet when confronted with the reality of dissolution, we often panic and reduce the issue to whether something should be demolished or preserved. In doing so, we overlook something more important: beyond landscapes and buildings lies the historical context that carries them.

Once that context has been severed, what significance remains in preserving a few fragments of broken brick and crumbling walls? Their preservation may itself become an empty gesture. Physical dissolution is not necessarily an absolute evil, while that which is preserved may remain no more than a hollow form.

As stated at the beginning, I regard Kangle as a mirror reflecting my own hometown. This body of work will also serve as a starting point from which to trace and untangle my own context.

Everything will be laid bare—honestly and without concealment. Within this three-dimensional mirror, I have come to understand with painful clarity that, unless I undertake this process, I will have nowhere to place myself.