<Formation No. 1: On Levitation> Pei-Hsuan Wang Solo

<Formation No.1: On Levitation> Pei-Hsuan Wang Solo
Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00
Sat 13:30-21:00
Mon-Sun by appointment

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Formation: a genuine, formal emergence. The creation or configuration of something concrete or abstract.

No. 1: the beginning. A series of “something more” forthcoming. A hint for additional experimentations.

Levitation: the state of hovering, of not touching the ground but undoubtedly implying the true existence of the ground—an inextricable and paradoxical relationship of detachment and reliance, of objectivity and subjectivity.

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Taiwan, I claim you to be my own. Wholeheartedly, I tell it to my face that you are my home, a womb of some sort. But what do I really know about you?

I found myself, upon my reentrance, participating in a series of events that purposefully engages my physical body with the realities of the country. A continuing whirlwind of social movements and civil activism. Protests rallies lectures. My mind, despite everything, hovers a little above my body, observing all colors from a hushed distance.

Living in Taipei, I watch the city pass before me on the train in long intervals. I see the façade of it. The clouded surface that hints at some ten thousand million stories of peoples and places within. Iron grids painted white blue red green pink purple and yellow. Buildings tiled in muted colors of puke that become even more offensive in its chromaticity as the subtropical humidity grinds itself in throughout the basin. Rolling hills and blotches of green dot the incessant flashcards of a giant machine, disrupted by the omnipotent presence of power towers and faux modernist architecture. I see the unique nooks and crannies that slowly blur into one foggy pool of inconsequentiality. It is the face of a city; a city that seems so accommodating yet somehow denies its own idiosyncrasies. A city that dreams of bright, brilliant futures but lets its pasts and presences flow soundlessly by day and night.

There is an urge to confront my own habitual detachment to things dear, accompanied often by the immediate reflex of desiring to relate. Stanley Aronowitz, in Working Class Culture in an Electronic Age, talks about a “nostalgia for an absent subject,” something I interpret as a stand-in for things that hardly was and never will be: a powerful puff that possesses a touch of profanity but is sacred at the same time. If in a nation, it could carry the collective aspiration of the masses. An ideal dreamscape for both disguising and illuminating our own sense of detachment thus emerges.

I am here. But am somewhere else at the same time.

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I have been thinking about my relationship with Taiwan. I always have. Following my return to the country after seven or eight formative years in the United States, and particularly since my relocation to the city of Taipei, however, I have noticed a deep, contradicting well of detachment brooding inside of me. A detachment towards this place I now live in. It is a withdrawal that gives rise to a stubborn yet romantic sense of solitude in my personhood.

I want to shape and materialize this somewhat abstract mindscape/landscape. There exists in me a strong need to construct a site that rationalizes and organizes my thoughts, a site both physical and cerebral that emerges from a private, personal place: a site for perpetual storytelling.

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Special thanks to: Bamboo Curtain Studio, Chen Cheng-Hsun, Joan Chang, Margaret Shiu, Cindy Hsieh, and Haynes Rile