There are all kinds of gaps and seams in the prison environment, be it crevices and door seams towards the outside of prison cells or gaps and openings created by cell window bars. They constituted the everyday view of the political prisoners. However, phonetically speaking, the meaning of the Mandarin character “縫” is twofold: when pronounced in the fourth tone, the character denotes crevices, openings or gaps; but when pronounced in the second tone, it is used as a verb that means “mending” or “sawing.” The work is based on such a contronymic concept to respond to the contradictory relationship between the political prisoners in White Terror and the state power. 
Hong Jun-Yuan films the process of a political prisoner’s failed attempt to escape from the prison. After a tortuous, oppressive and suffering journey, as he gazes into the sea at the exit, the escape eventually becomes a self-contradictory exhaustion. In addition, memories of the White Terror victim.

Gap/Seam

“1975 of my mother and me” is the final release of the series “Where do you come from”. The series segments the artist’s life experiences in different works featuring significant years. The previous three pieces are respectively about 1981, the year when he was born, 1990, in which his parents divorced, and the year of 2020 when his mother is living alone. “1975 of my mother and me” marks the year of 1975 when his parents got married. The artist explores the meanings of marriage and family in a retrospective way.  From the artist’s viewpoint, his mother’s anguish is beyond her personal adversity; instead, she could symbolize any other females under the patriarchy of the era. The work shows numerous customs of the traditional wedding ceremony, his mother’s suffering from his father and elder brother during her marriage, and imagination about the interaction between his uterine sister and his mother before her second marriage

1975 of my mother and me

This video work has a strong self-experience inherent emotional vacancies, especially divorced parents, domestic violence, economic weaknesses, and other broken primitive family growth, becoming a reductive sample of the inner spirit. Due to the above factors, the three protagonists of the image reflect the inability to repair the direct emotional structure, forming many contradictory characters and inner entanglement when facing the object, while the cascading in the close-up is the creator and the mother and the message dialogue. A fragment between. Back in the image of the work, strong waves attacked and eroded the traces of the face. The corners of the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth are the legacy of the waves. Even if the facial expression is distorted and sad, the outer contour is surprisingly beautiful waves. Ironically, the interior of the facial image has long been the inner vacuum of emotional retreat.

Absence

The film consists of the photographic narratives of individuals’ polaroid pictures taken at the time of their birth, which is used as the intertwining signifiers. A few of the selected actors came from broken families and had similar life experiences as the concept expressed in this work. In other words, the subjects in the images are not only a semiotic interpretation of role-playing​ but also a reiteration of life experiences that overlap with these actors. That is, the creative approach adopted constantly seeks subjects close to its own life trajectory as a way to realize internal, psychological imageries and spiritual restoration. The creator also interrogates life politics through these filmed subjects and mirrors the characters in his work as layered, synchronic planes. This series consistently focuses on the underlying implications behind broken families. In this film, the Li Shike incident is used as a prism of reflection of exterior identity criticism from the subject’s interior image in order to examine the easily alienated individuals in the social structure. When many people focus on ethnic origin and identity tracing nowadays, the kind of evasive, unattainable locality is the key spirit of this work. "Where do you come from?" is a commonly asked question in daily conversations. However, the innate nature of this question holds a certain sense of identity, neglect of other ethnic groups, and a classified cognition of oneself as a form of universal, normalized value.

Where do you come from

The reason for choosing dance as a motivation for performance is actually very intuitive, because in the past when parents quarreled, there were always many processes of physical scuffles and falling with their father. Therefore, this kind of experience is very “corporeal” in my mind. I naturally hope to borrow The gesture of dance is used as a representation of this kind of emotional description. In fact, starting with the "absence" series, the character I look for will always point to objects with similar family backgrounds, that is, to create creative responses in this stratosphere, but this time the dancers are more innocent in the family. But also take this opportunity to be able to place his creative spirit on an external platform, so that dancers understand the creator's aspirations, and perform physical absorption and interpretation. The focus and close-up shots of the film, and the different perspectives of the long-shot panorama, show emotionally tangled posture and strength.

Invalid

The concept originating from a parental quarrel, the father broke all the floor-to-ceiling windows in the house at the critical point of his emotions, so the glass and crackling sounds became the main conversion symbols and sound in the work. The protagonist of the movie finds a group of photos in the drainage ditch at night (this group of photos is actually a picture of many broken floor windows on the Internet), and the process of watching carefully with a flashlight is like the meaning of staring at the photo It means a process of recalling memories, and because of the similar experience in the past, the main character of me and the film acted as a mutual mirroring of life, and in the sound of cracking glass, the remaining memories in the body were cut.

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Jun-Yuan Hong