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It was not long ago that my friends and I talked about the Sunflower Movement and out of curiosity, I asked them about their daily life during that period of time. As a senior high student at that time, one of them said what worried him most was the difficulties to fight his way through the crowd to the cram school on Nanyang Street. Another mentioned that he had to bypass the barricades to get into the school. The others were even teased about going along for the ride as checking in at the Legislative Yuan. This shows the fact that the differentiated experiences and concerns vary greatly across individuals and periods. On the contrary, what’s coherent is the sense of time of walking on a tarred road. However, in the end, we did not discuss further about how we felt about the movement and how it has influenced us till now. Either a catastrophic scene caused by a compression on the ground surface or a battlefield for protesting marks notes in linear time and expresses different emotions toward the same thing. The gap of sensibilities is documented not only in earthquake cracks on walls and faded protest stickers on utility poles but also when wearing facial masks becomes the new normal nowadays. While the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world with alarming speed, the time is divided into before and after the pandemic and even the future without it. Things move latently across actual spaces, like streets, movie theatres, campus, carriages and embody within emotions as well.

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From a public sphere to a moment of solitude, the “us” here is no longer a call to strengthen a collective awareness but to anchor a self-presence in dramatic changes and turbulence. In the frame of social identity, how can emotional responses of individuals reflect or foresee a social vision?

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The question is addressed in this exhibition: it views adolescence as an indication which is hardly defined with sensibilities and takes the exhibition space on Beiping East Road as the road extending into a predictable future. What’s happened and happening will eventually become parts of the past. Therefore, how can we identify the feeling at that particular moment? Those we missed, on the one hand, settle in our shared experiences. On the other hand, they reframe our perspectives toward certain things. This exhibition collects changes of time and feelings; moreover, reviews a social awareness via a personal monologue:how can “I” distinguish reality from my personal illusion?

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This exhibition invites three artists to outline the scenario. In her work On the Ground, Yen-Yen Ho takes a newspaper clipping as materials. This overlooked information about a Taiwanese cosmologist found the evidence of the earth’s inflation was placed at the bottom of the front page on March 19th 2014. She provides another way of viewing and engaging a temporary community. Ground textures of road, playground and indoor stadium are placed as movable vertical panels. These ground panels escape from their purpose of gathering and the friction of dragging panels resonates the parallel universe outside. On the other hand, Chi-Chuan Yang’s work The Rhythm Inside is based on her experience of singing in a choir in senior high school. She invites the choir of Taipei Municipal Heping Senior High School to co-record the song, Ode to Bozung, interpreting each distinctive voice existing in a society. Tsung-Hsun Tsai, in his work, Far Side, delivers a message—a time capsule to his future self. Covered with light steel frames and calcium silicate panels, the ceiling turns into a gentle incline. The light streaming behind the ceiling casts a long shadow of calcium silicate panel on other objects intentionally arranged in the space. The artist cuts, sticks and joints a slice of objective time onto an intimate and personalized one. The known time intersects with the unknown one, and meanwhile the intersection leads to an internal dialogue of the artist’s himself.

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In other words, this specific age manifests an unfinished condition: the awareness of distinguishing “I” from “the other” and an ongoing identity construction. Thus, this condition should be seen as a linear and proceeding one with sensibilities, like a highway runs from an individual toward a collective. Taiwan, likewise, has featured this kind of ambiguous and unsettled situation in every aspect. From unfolding a historical situation to tracing self-monologue, whether an event is objectively described or symbolized into a simple and flat one? Through an unreasoning back-and-forth which seemingly underlines and values sensibilities, this exhibition tends to address whether there is an autobiography-like approach to depict social scenes in our time. When an event gets into history, how can we take a detour in time to retrospect and interpret those happened life experiences once again?