Theirstories (2024) is an evolving art-educational initiative situated in the NOW Room that employs multiple media—including painting, photography, sculpture, site-specific installation, and participatory arts—to examine gender-based violence through creative and curatorial practices. The project establishes exhibitions as critical spaces for reflection and engagement with identity politics and representational boundaries.
The works specifically address the experiences of a digital generation by incorporating interviews with Taiwanese feminist activists born between 1985-1995. Theirstories creates a meaningful intersection between digital narratives and physical experience, deliberately materializing personal testimonies within tangible space to highlight the embodied labor, materiality, and emotional dimensions of artistic expression.
Through its textual elements, installations, and interactive components, the project invites visitors to contemplate the subtle and pervasive forms of violence in contemporary society while imagining alternative modes of presence, expression, and collective consciousness.
Untitled II pays homage to Betty Friedan’s The Problem That Has No Name while confronting the persistent and often unspoken realities of gender-based violence. This piece transcribes interview fragments onto white-painted CDs—symbolic carriers of memory and silence. These testimonies reflect forms of violence that remain unnamed, uncategorized, or linguistically elusive: everyday discrimination, rigid gender expectations, and systemic oppression embedded in both intimate and institutional spaces.
The use of CDs evokes the artist-researcher’s millennial upbringing—once central to youth culture, now obsolete in the age of streaming. Stripped of playback devices, the CD becomes mute, embodying the metaphor of voices that remain unheard. Through visual inscription, the work transforms oral testimonies into material traces, drawing attention to the difficulty of naming and hearing certain lived experiences. In doing so, Untitled II explores how art can give form to what resists articulation, and how the search for language is itself a political and poetic act.
The installation features a strategic arrangement of color-coded sticky notes that invites visitor participation and dialogue. Upon entering, guests encounter a table displaying a taxonomy of social issues, with colored notes corresponding to seven key thematic categories: feminism, gender diversity, bodily autonomy, gender-inclusive spaces, digital sexual violence, misogyny, and the #metoo movement. The adjacent wall showcases a vibrant collection of notes bearing diverse perspectives on these themes.
This participatory framework encourages visitors to contribute their own thoughts using provided writing materials. The resulting discourse represents a spectrum of engagement—from interrogative to declarative, confessional to philosophical, challenging to supportive. As contributions accumulate, they form an organic network of ideas where conceptual relationships emerge organically; some notes cluster in thematic solidarity while others maintain critical distance. The installation thus transforms into a visual representation of collective dialogue where perspectives interact, complement, and occasionally challenge one another, creating a dynamic cartography of contemporary gender discourse.
Between Past and Future (2023) is a mixed-media, site-specific installation housed within the History Gallery that engages conceptually with Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Taking its cue from Arendt's essay "What is Freedom?", the work explores political action as an expression of human plurality—emphasizing difference, coexistence, and mutual presence. The installation affirms Arendt's conception of freedom as fundamentally relational, emerging through participatory engagement and collective world-building.
Situated as a "gallery within a gallery" inside the Yi Jia Yi Guan, the installation responds to the Family Gallery's Korean War exhibition—a narrative constructed nearly forty years ago. While acknowledging the archival materials that define this historical space, the work deliberately focuses on historical absences—those elements not preserved in vitrines, photographic frames, or documentary evidence. It directs attention to the unnamed, unarchived, and ephemeral aspects that exist at the margins of institutional memory.
The installation incorporates an interactive booklet that provides visitors with a personal entry point into this complex history. By inviting participants to sit, write, stamp, draw, or simply add their signatures, the work transforms viewers into active contributors to an ongoing, intergenerational dialogue between documented history and lived experience.
The seating area features a curated collection of writing implements, including pens and correction fluid, alongside historically significant stamps inherited from previous custodians of the Yi Jia Yi Guan program. The table presents instruction cards beneath transparent protective covers, each paired with photographic documentation that contextualizes the participatory activity. This arranged station invites visitors to engage directly with the documentary process, allowing them to contribute to the ongoing historical narrative using tools that bridge past and present practices.