The Sea and the Tower of Babel—Ocean and the Interpreter
Blog post description.
1.
Curated by Nobuo Takamori, the third season of “Ocean and the Interpreter” opens with Salah Elmur's Green Sky (2022), underscoring the exhibition's distinctive fluidity. Elmur’s artwork appears to be a family portrait: two women in matching mother-daughter outfits cling to a younger brother or sister at the center, while the mother's hand pulls his collar. The painting preserves the intimacy conveyed by their poses and attire in the photograph, while the sculptural faces lend individuality to the figures. The artist altered the background, yet the setting remains in a studio. Overall, the work conveys the figures' everyday presence, with a peculiar sense of being confronted by the camera lens.
In the juxtaposition of painting and photograph, the family's converging gazes also reveal a reversal of stylistic influence. These photographs originate from Studio Kamal, the Khartoum-based photography studio founded by the artist's grandfather and father. What gives these photographs their nostalgic glow—and draws us closer to them—is their modernist style in local idiom. This modernist style evolved from the Khartoum School in Sudan after Africa's decolonization in the 1960s. Its primitivist hues reveal how European modernism initially absorbed African artistic heritage in a contentious manner—an influence that later came full circle to become the model for Africa's post-independence development of modern art. Beyond artistic style, most post-independence nations also inherited colonial borders and languages, which unified diverse ethnic groups and dialects within their territories. As a result, the universality and paradigmatic status Western culture attained during colonization inevitably became a major cultural-political issue vis-à-vis these national cultures.
Ousmane Sembène, hailed as the father of African cinema, once stated, “Africa is my ‘audience,’ while the West and ‘elsewhere’ are my ‘market.’” His film Xala (1975) is set against the backdrop of Senegal reclaiming control of its chamber of commerce from the French after independence. To further illustrate the persistence of colonial legacies, El Hadji, a chamber member, marries his third wife on the very day of the power transition. Yet on their wedding night, he discovers he has lost his virility. Believing a jealous wife had cursed him, El Hadji seeks help from a sorcerer when all else fails. Ultimately, he discovers the true source of the curse…
Sembène's portrayal of post-independence Senegalese politics carries multi-layered satire, revealing how old traditions and colonial legacies continue to influence independent African nations. El Hadji, corrupted and obsessed with European imports, turns to traditional witch doctors when no modern cure is available. During a conversation with his eldest daughter, he irritably asks why she answers him in Wolof when he speaks French. Yet when he urgently defends himself in Wolof during a voting meeting, the chamber president corrects him: “Even insults must be delivered in the purest French tradition.” Another character, the Frenchman Dupont, symbolizes the lingering influence of former colonizers within these independent nations. After moving from a key chamber role to an advisory role to the African president of commerce, he appears powerless. Yet from the moment he delivers suitcases brimming with cash to chamber members, he beholds their farces with detached amusement. His constant presence beside the African chamber president hints at his latent influence. Even when the president introduces a sorcerer to El Hadji, the president must dismiss Dupont first, as if they must hide this shame from the former colonizer’s sight.
Sembène first gained prominence in Francophone literary circles through his French novels and involvement in labor movements. After studying photography in Moscow in 1962, he returned to Senegal to pursue a career in filmmaking. His Moscow journey was not unique in Cold War-era Africa, where both the Soviet Union and the United States sought leverage in newly independent African countries, occasionally instigating coups to install their favored dictators. This Cold War context underpins the next discussion of China's presence in Africa. Simply put, after the renowned Bandung Conference (1955), China supported Egypt's reclamation of the Suez Canal and backed independence movements in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia on anti-colonial and anti-imperialist principles. Later, during the Cultural Revolution and its split with the Soviet Union, China aided leftist rebel forces in countries like Niger, Congo, and Uganda through Maoist propaganda promoting global revolution. After these minor revolutions failed, China shifted toward pragmatic diplomacy in the 1970s, collaborating with existing African governments. Following the Tiananmen Square protests (1989), while Western countries condemned and boycotted China, a few African countries publicly supported Beijing, with most others remaining silent. Since then, China has increased investment in Africa, deepening ties that persist today.
In Ethiopian artist Mulugeta Gebrekidan's video Waiting (2015), the protagonist stands on the empty platform, awaiting the long-delayed Addis Ababa light rail transit, a Chinese-funded project. This artwork builds upon the artist's earlier piece Filling the Gaps (2013), emphasizing the profound impact of urban development on culture, history, and identity. In Waiting, the artist, wearing a hat and neatly dressed, carries a flywhisk (a traditional symbol of status in Africa) as he approaches the still-under-construction platform. His attire and demeanor contrast sharply with the busy passersby crossing the level crossing behind him. A puff of smoke emerging from the lower right corner suggests that even this well-dressed traveler will see his wish for a leisurely life vanish into thin air. Finally, although the platform depicted in the film was eventually completed, its operational revenues fell far short of the feasibility study initially proposed by the Chinese side, leaving Ethiopia with a massive debt burden.
Yao Jui-Chung and Hank Cheng's Chinese Pagoda(Domaine Agro-Industriel Présidentiel de la N'Sele) (2020) tells the story of an alternative China. According to Nobuo Takamori's research (https\://artouch.com/artouch-column/content-12572.html), this peculiar Chinese-style structure near Kinshasa, DRC—playfully dubbed the “Chinese Pagoda” by locals—was completed around 1970 or 1971. The pagoda's exterior was constructed by an agricultural team from the Republic of China, modeled after some famous Chinese-style official buildings on the island of Taiwan: Yangmingshan Zhongshan Hall, Nanhai Academy Science Museum, or, maybe, Tamsui Wuji Tianyuan Temple—and these buildings on the island of Taiwan replicated Beijing's Temple of Heaven. The Chinese Pagoda served as the ROC agricultural team's headquarters in name only, but Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko appropriated it as his private palace. It remains unclear who designed the Pagoda or what Mobutu thought of such designs. Instead, he appeared to favor an architectural style termed “Tropical Modernism,” an adaptation of the International Style for tropical regions. His other palace in Gbadolite exemplifies this, an exaggerated European-style structure humorously dubbed the “Jungle Versailles.” Although further verification is needed, I believe the “Chinese Pagoda” also served, stylistically, as a model for the Republic of China to promote its claimed Chinese cultural orthodoxy at that time. This coincided with China's Cultural Revolution, during which China not only supported leftist rebel forces in Africa but also distributed large quantities of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung across the continent. The Republic of China seized this opportunity to assert its cultural legitimacy internationally through replicas of the Beijing Temple of Heaven.
Cold War ideologies continually crossed borders, giving rise to works such as Mark Salvatus's Notes from the New World(2015-20), Naeem Mohaiemen's United Red Army (2018), and Che Onejoon's My Utopia (2018). To show how these ideological movements permeated artistic production, this paper will later discuss Mark Salvatus's work. Naeem Mohaiemen's United Red Army is part of his “The Young Man Was” series. The film depicts the Dhaka Hijacking on September 28, 1977. In the incident, Japanese Red Army members hijacked a Japan Airlines flight. They flew to Dhaka, Bangladesh, demanding the Japanese government release nine imprisoned Red Army members and pay a $6 million ransom.
Through recorded conversations between the hijackers and the airport control tower, the artist masterfully conveys the negotiation process—shifting from intimacy to near-collapse—and how consensus was reached through dialogue mediated by a third-party language, ultimately leading to unforeseen consequences. On the surface, this appeared to be a successful terrorist operation: under the Japanese government's “extra-legal measures”(超法規的措置), they secured the ransom and the release of their comrades imprisoned in Japan. However, the hijacking also triggered another coup at Dhaka Airport, resulting in the deaths of 11 officers and thousands of soldiers. Mohaiemen's series critically examines this radical leftist history, arguing it inadvertently fueled the rise of the right wing. At the same time, the artwork reframes the incident through the lens of the artist’s childhood. At eight years old, he was waiting to watch The Zoo Gang when the broadcast of the hijacking suddenly interrupted the program. By introducing this frame story, the artist draws an analogy between the event and the outlaw-hero archetype, ultimately offering a sympathetic interpretation rooted in his personal memories.
Che Onejoon's My Utopia converges these transnational ideological movements onto individual life experiences. The film's protagonist, Monique Macías, was born in Equatorial Guinea as the daughter of the country's dictator, Francisco Macías Nguema. Monique only learned of her father's fate later in life. Having grown up in North Korea, she became most proficient in Korean and regarded North Korea as her homeland. However, because of her skin color, she was not accepted as North Korean and was forced to learn Spanish, the official language of Equatorial Guinea.
In contrast, Equatorial Guinea's native languages had long been buried under Spain's colonial rule. This experience left Monica feeling like an outsider everywhere. After graduating, she lived in Spain, the United States, and eventually South Korea.
Throughout the film, Monica repeatedly asks, “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where should I go?” Other female characters occasionally voice her self-questioning and monologue, allowing My Utopia to extend her life experience to them. These figures include a Spanish teacher, a classmate from the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, Anne from East Germany, and Soo-hyun from South Korea, whom she encounters by chance on the streets of New York, and all share the belief that their own countries represent some form of utopia. This reflects the stereotypical link between women and national consciousness, but their encounters themselves forge an outlet beyond nationalist ideology, with Korean unexpectedly becoming their lingua franca. The artist deliberately exposes stage sets and camera positioning within the film. This artistic manipulation serves a dual purpose: it shows that the sense of place is built on personal narratives and facilitates conversation among these female characters in the same space.
A similar artistic intervention is seen in Che Onejoon's other work, Made in Korea (2021). Since the 1980s, labor shortages in Korea have led to a large influx of foreign workers. Many African laborers settled in Dongducheon, Paju City, and Pyeongtaek City's Songtan district, forming tight-knit communities isolated from Korean society. Working round-the-clock shifts in factories, they spent their limited free time participating in community activities within their own neighborhoods, leaving little opportunity to engage with Korean society. Recognizing that these workers would inevitably become part of Korean society, the artist collaborated with them to create a music video, aiming to use art to break through this isolation.
2.
Many works in “Ocean and the Interpreter” draw upon historical archives. Among them, the aforementioned Naeem Mohaiemen film, United Red Army, stands as a masterful example of using sound archives to convey the context and atmosphere of events. Other works employ reënactments, actual interviews, or other more intriguing methods to connect limited documentary materials to various contexts. As contemporary works, they all carefully preserve the traces of how they handle these connections, much like the set stages in Che Onejoon's My Utopia, to avoid presenting the work's perspective as a universal viewpoint.
Carlos Motta's Corpo Fechado: the Devil’s Work (2018) is a visually rich film with a narrative structure marked by clear contrasts. The protagonist, Francisco José Pereira, was an enslaved person abducted from West Africa to Brazil. Baptized as a Catholic, he developed religious rituals blending Christianity with African traditions alongside fellow enslaved people. When sold to Portugal in 1731, the local Inquisition accused him of practicing witchcraft. He confessed and revealed that he had copulated with a male demon to create mandinga bags (bolsas de mandinga, amulets). Ultimately, he was banished from Lisbon and forced to row for life on a paddle-sail vessel. The film's protagonist narrates his own story. His account never reaches the point of jouissance. Instead, through narrative distance, he suggests two histories: one imposed by the Church, and another in which African religion and Catholicism were fated to fuse through an unfortunate encounter. The artist conceives the protagonist as an embodiment of Benjamin’s “angel of history” (in one draft of this concept, Benjamin envisioned a fallen angel, the dual aspect of the Messiah, from his 1933 essay “Agesilaus Santander”). Ultimately, the artist appropriates the iconography of the Virgin Mary holding the crucified Christ, transforming the protagonist into a new Messiah.
“It’s true, it had to be said, there isn’t a place in the world where black people are considered highly.” (General Jean Gomis, born in 1933 in Mong Cai City, returned to Senegal with his father in 1948) “My mother’s name will not be heard from any other mouth than my own.” (Macodou Ndiaye, born in Saigon in 1956, learned of his mother only through his father's letter in 1975), “And it’s only in ’88, when my parents died, that I learnt that I was adopted.” (Lily Bayoumy, born in Saigon, found on the battlefield of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu) Tuan Andrew Nguyen's Mother, Métis, Memory (2022) appears to stem from his 2019 work The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, which similarly focuses on a Vietnamese community in Senegal. During the Franco-Vietnamese War, some Senegalese soldiers married local women and had children. When France later withdrew, some abandoned their families, while others returned to Senegal with their children. In this interview film, the artist's narrative is fragmented, roughly following topics as it jumps between different individuals' accounts. Throughout the last century, France recruited soldiers from its colonies to fight its wars. These soldiers not only fought in World War II but also served across various colonies—from Vietnam to Algeria—helping France suppress colonial uprisings. Thus, these wars were not merely conflicts between colonizers and the colonized, but also brutal clashes between colonized peoples themselves (the artist's other work, Our Empty Uniforms [2020], imagines their collaboration).
The stories of these Senegalese-Vietnamese communities complicate the colonialist-colonized dynamic within colonialism. Moreover, post-decolonization independence has made it difficult for either Senegal or Vietnam to accommodate these individuals' lived experiences within their respective national histories. In Vietnam, as these mixed-race individuals walked down the street, “shutters rolled down before them” (Bouba Diallo). Returning to Senegal, they were mistaken for Chinese— Or there were questions like: “But apparently you eat with little sticks?”’ (Anne-Marie Niane). Their mixed heritage profoundly disrupted family traditions and customs, yet they ultimately integrated into Senegalese society. The film concludes with a song that aptly encapsulates the arduous journey of their assimilation.
Au Sow Yee’s Pirates, the Trembling Ship, and their 1001 Nights I: Ron and Row (2022) depicts the pirate Abdulla al-Hadj, whose life is documented solely in a court testimony. This court testimony was recorded after his capture during a trial by the East India Company in Penang. In the testimony, he recounted being born in Canterbury, England, taken to the Middle East in his youth, then converting to Islam and eventually becoming a pirate in the South China Sea near North Borneo, plundering British merchant ships. The artwork presents Abdulla's story as a genre narrative: the fearless, legendary outlaw hero ultimately meets his deserved fate. This genre is transformed into a mythic archetype, a typical theme with its inherent self-conflict or disruption. In the film, the British nursery rhyme “Row Row Row Your Boat,” serving as the main theme, seems to symbolize the expansion of colonial capitalism. Through a montage of historical footage—from colonialism to Cold War technology—it extends its power into both reality and imagination. It embodies the ship of adventure, pleasure, exploration, outward or inward, science fiction imagination. Like a catchy nursery rhyme, it flows downstream, sailing smoothly—a journey blessed by fortune.
Yet this meticulously planned voyage harbors inherent contradictions. Abdulla Al-Hajji's journey not only effortlessly transcends the boundaries of identity and culture but also disrupts the flow of capital. He is the “mysterious man” who, after his trial, was taken to Mumbai and “never to be seen again.” Through his disappearance, the film transforms Abdulla Al-Hajee into a ghost of history while periodically summoning him by name. This invocation becomes a stone that occasionally blocks the Suez Canal, culminating in the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction. Within the seemingly omnipotent lullaby of capital and technology, the artist discerns an ancient curse persistently experimenting through trial and error, suddenly surfacing at unexpected moments to interfere and obstruct. This blessed voyage, destined to remain entangled in such impediments, becomes haunted by recurring specters. Endless progress transforms into an interminable curse. (Personally, this artwork constantly reminds me of the hooded boy in the Japanese comedy manga Fist of the North Star: Strawberry Flavor, who is stabbing the Holy Emperor Shausa with a dagger over and over again.)
One of my most intriguing experiences at this exhibition is watching a video artwork depicting a lighting technician illuminating a rock formation with a clamp lamp. This scene comes from LIN Jin Da + YU Cheng Che's Illuminating the Collection (2022). Though the technician appears motionless in the footage, he is actually simulating the gradual movement of sunlight. This rock sample, titled “Sahel Rock,” originated from an oil exploration site in Africa. After a long sea voyage, it eventually joined the collection at the Huesio Geological Museum. The rock itself witnesses geological time, yet in the video it becomes an anchor stone that bears witness to a subjective bodily experience of time. The lighting technician's museum practice imbues his involuntary wakefulness of insomnia with meaning, though it is clearly no simple feat. The dazed, time-consuming state of prolonged gazing, when reflected in the rock, evokes a kind of primal imagination of returning to a pure encounter between the human and the object. Viewers could grasp the vast disparity between these two temporalities of geological time and the museum practice. Yet, within the museum, it's difficult to dismiss the lighting technician’s practice of the rock as futile. To a significant degree, “Illuminating the Collection” articulates an archival experience—a preparatory act revealing how knowledge production continuously incorporates external or personal life experiences into the collection in a naturalized manner in museums.
Another archival-related work is Wang Hongkai and Lou Mo’s The Mist (2022). The exhibition space displays Kenya's monthly meteorological charts. Nearby, a reading corner table holds numerous books—primarily works by African authors—while headphones play songs about the Mau Mau uprising. The Mist draws inspiration from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s descriptions of Kenyan landscapes in Dreams That Bite the Dust and the mystery surrounding how the Kikuyu people lost their land. This work serves as preliminary research for a project. Next year, the artists will conduct fieldwork in Kenya to trace the Kikuyu people's migration routes. For now, it represents an attempt to imagine and depict the realism of Kenyan literature from afar, on the island of Taiwan.
3.
Mark Salvatus' Notes from the New World simultaneously blends pop music with archival research, anchoring the genre in the profound legacy of colonialism. My initial impression was the jarring incongruity of military musicians performing pop music. The video opens with a military band playing Rossini's William Tell Overture in what appears to be a break room. Another scene shows vinyl records of pop music that the artist's father collected in the 1970s. On the one hand, this military band has a long history. Originally established by the colonial government during the Mexican-American War as the Constabulary Band, it was led by an African American and comprised Filipino members. They gained notoriety for performing the same Rossini's music at the infamous St. Louis World's Fair. After the war, the Philippine military reorganized the band, with one branch renamed the Philippine Army Band. During the martial law period of the 1970s, it performed pop music—a stark contrast reflected in the vinyl records the artist's father collected.
This artwork examines America's enduring influence, spanning from colonialism to popular music. What intrigued me most, though, was the initial dissonance I felt when I first watched the video. The existence of this military band reflects that so-called nationalism isn't merely an imagined community. It is also a tangible presence in roles such as the military and police. From colonial regimes to post-decolonization independent nations, these units are required to secure internal and external social and cultural boundaries. When you try to cross the line, rifles and batons will remind you of reality. On the other hand, their formal expressions seep into popular cultural imagination—like children's toy police cars—becoming objects of worship in certain post-martial law societies. The film also contains other paradoxes, such as the colonial government using Filipino members to promote local color, despite “William Tell Overture” originally telling a story of resistance against tyranny.
Salvatus extends the exploration of colonialism from the top down to popular culture, offering a reference point for discussing other works with similar themes. Musquiqui Chihying, Elom 20ce, and Gregor Kasper's “The Currency” (2020) are other works related to popular music. This piece deviates from conventional exhibition formats, requiring gallery staff to operate the playback device so that visitors can listen. It is a collective project released on vinyl, with the on-site display incorporating elements of a physical music album: a record and cover designed to resemble a semiconductor wafer, along with the lyrics. This tangible audio presentation holds symbolic significance in the music streaming era—perhaps especially for rap, a genre born in subculture yet heavily commercialized. On the one hand, vinyl is the most lossless music storage medium; on the other, only within an art exhibition can the concepts conveyed by music receive more specific, focused attention.
Listening to physical music alongside an exhibition lets the musical content connect freely with a range of issues. Togolese rapper Elom 20ce narrates, from the perspective of a banknote in a briefcase, how villagers in Kpagalam resisted the violence of their own military and police forces defending Chinese mining rights, and links this event to the ECO issue. (ECO is the new currency proposed by ECOWAS to replace the CFA Franc, which has circulated since colonial times. While the plan now exempts participating nations from the requirement to deposit half their currency reserves in France's central bank, it maintains a fixed exchange rate to the euro. This has drawn criticism that it merely renames a colonial-era currency.) Chihying's work uses Alipay as an example, employing the namesake figure to highlight that China's economic power is not only directed toward the African aid mentioned but also leveraged through electronic payments for domestic social control. German artist Kaspar's song reminds us that behind this clean virtual world created by wafer manufacturing and other electronics lies a reality of labor-intensive work under harsh conditions.
Hoo Fan Chon's How to Dance Like a Mudskipper (2022) embeds the archaeology of objects within the politics of nation-building and ingeniously applies it to an aerobics routine. The mudskipper has been a recurring motif in the artist's practice. In his 2019 solo exhibition “Biro Kaji Visual George Town” (Narrow Marrow Café, Dec. 14, 2019–Jan 7, 2020), he replaced one of the paired dolphins in the Penang Island City Council emblem with a mudskipper to localize the original emblem inherited from the British colonial era. This choice stems from mudskippers being not only commonly seen in Penang but also historically a delicacy among Malays. Folklore associated with mudskippers even inspired the 1959 film The Devouring Rock. Later, in February 2021, during the exhibition “Nagoya × Penang Simultaneous Exhibition: Nagoya Cultural Dispatch Bureau (Nagoya Headquarters)” (Minatomachi POTLUCK BUILDING 3F: Exhibition Space), the artist proposed “Mud-chihoko on Komtar: A Diplomatic Gift Proposal from Nagoya City Hall to Penang's George Town.” The proposal suggested creating a pair of mudskipper-shaped shachihoko (guardian fish ornaments installed at both ends of the roof ridge in traditional Japanese architecture) as a gift from Nagoya City to Penang. These ornaments would be installed on the top of Komtar, Penang's tallest building.
The artist clearly seizes every opportunity to promote mudskippers. For “How to Dance Like a Mudskipper,” tatami mats were specifically chosen to introduce mudskippers to Taiwanese audiences, with Fiddle-leaf figs—native to African rainforests—placed at the corners. The dancer first introduced the basic moves inspired by mudskippers, then mentioned the film The Devouring Rock. Beyond the dance, the film's most amusing moment might be when the dancer steps into a muddy pool in the mangrove forest, ready to teach the dance, only for numerous mudskippers to scatter at her feet. In this work, the artist overlays the healthy national image of national construction with healthy routines found in popular lifestyle trends—two concepts not always easy to distinguish, as shown by Taiwan's folk dances, which originated from military promotion during martial law. At the same time, the piece skillfully highlights the naturalization process inherent in both national construction and online fitness videos through an innovative dance form.
Also invoking song and dance, Posak Jodian's Misafafahiyan Metamorphosis (2022) tells the story of Hao Hao, an indigenous transgender performer. Hao Hao initially studied hairdressing in their hometown but, unable to make a living, traveled to Taipei to audition for a singing competition after seeing an advertisement for the “King and Queen of Song” contest. He later performed at the First Theatre Restaurant on Zhonghua Rd. in Taipei and traveled to Japan, Thailand, and other countries for shows. Hao Hao's career traversed the rise and fall of nightclubs, Western restaurants, and strip clubs, revealing that transgender performers were not taboo in past popular entertainment cultures. Yet their history tends to be overlooked, even dismissed as relics of bygone eras. This work stands out for its spatial application: when the protagonist takes the stage, the stage becomes a backdrop; outside it, the setting shifts to his living room, where he washes people's hair and chats casually with family and friends. Thus, Hao Hao's performance evolves from initial strangeness to warmth and intimacy.
Three works stand out in the exhibition and explore far-reaching themes through concise and engaging creative approaches. Tirzo Martha's site-specific installation Emotional Memory (2022) features materials including a polystyrene hollow brick wall, sheet metal and wire mesh reinforcing the brick wall, suspended scrap tires, wine crates at the base of the wall, glass beer bottle shards installed by cement atop the wall for security, and suspended LED tubes. The words “AWA AKI” on the polystyrene hollow brick wall may be Papiamento, meaning “water is here.” The artist created an artwork with the same title in 2018, which also featured a wall built of gray bricks and reinforced with wire mesh. Using these materials, he creates structures that offer rudimentary shelter from wind and rain yet lack lasting reliability, simultaneously exploring the subtle tension arising from their inherent instability.
The artwork here embodies the artist's refined personal aesthetic vocabulary. When this vocabulary reveals architectural commonalities between the islands of Curaçao and Taiwan, it also tentatively touches on the contrasting social conditions of both places through these comparisons. In the case of the island of Taiwan, these structures’ emergence isn't necessarily tied to economic hardship. In reality, they are often sturdier than one might imagine, able to endure for decades through partial additions and reinforcements. Their disappearance more often stems from external factors such as legal enforcement, renovations, or urban renewal projects. On the other hand, this impression of sturdiness might also reflect survivor bias, as the actual risks to structures and public safety do persist. Thus, taken together, the precarious equilibrium of tension in these “emotional memories” reflects a habitual normality of living amidst risk.
Chang En-man's Snail Paradise Trilogy: Setting Snail or Final Chapter (2021) frames the question of human origins through food. The protagonist processes crops, tends livestock, and sings ancient Paiwan melodies about the origins of African giant snails, Shōwa grass, and Taiwanese paper mulberry. This work has a concise narrative structure yet raises profound questions. Its scenes suggest that human origins are inextricably linked to subsistence practices. Thus, when the protagonist proposes following snails to trace humanity's beginnings, he frames the question through the relationship between humans and food. Tracing humanity through food proves challenging, as omnivorous humans lack the fixed dietary patterns of animals. They not only consume whatever is available wherever they go, but also creatively shape customs and hierarchies. These customs preserve the ancient relationship between guest and host at the table and unfold the transformations of diverse food cultures. Meanwhile, the profit-driven motives of colonialism accelerated the exchange of species across regions and alienated the relationship between humans and food.
This narrative framework itself is a manifestation of subjectivity. When the male protagonist finally asks, "What about us? Who are we? Where do we come from?" he is rephrasing Gauguin's question from an indigenous perspective. This invokes a primitivist context while simultaneously leveraging the narrator's privilege to deepen it, extending it to contemporary circumstances and grounding its modernity within the film's various settings.
Stefanos Tsivopoulos's Land (2006) is the final work featured in this article. What intrigues me about this work is how it interprets its content. Within the film, three individuals from distinct regions pose numerous questions on a deserted island concerning the naming, ownership, domination, and borders of land. These questions readily reveal how artificial political boundaries are imposed upon land, shaping culture and identity. These intractable issues also relate to the work's formal elements, such as the identities of the three male characters. In other exhibitions, they are sometimes called shipwreck survivors or refugees, yet their physical states seem inconsistent with these roles. In the film, their personas remain as unanchored as the island itself, and their inability to communicate prevents any meaningful discussion of their questions—in other words, the island functions as a miniature Tower of Babel.
When these individuals' identities are open to interpretation as various marginalized roles, the island itself receives less scrutiny. In reality, because they cannot communicate with each other, their questions could only arise from the island itself. This small island is presented with a certain “primitive” quality and a given reality for these men. How do they eat? How do they survive here? The island is sometimes described as “uninhabitable”, but is that truly the case? In several scenes, distant coastal mountain ranges are visible, and fishing boats are nearby—it hardly resembles an isolated island.
So what exactly are these neatly dressed backpackers doing here!? On this small island, they seem more intent on distancing themselves from all forms of exchange—capital, food, voodoo religion, mixed heritage, the angel of history, domination, and resistance, which all occur between the waves. Such exchanges once embodied the dogma of naturalistic international law—a European-centric notion of liberty. Under this doctrine, Europeans could freely navigate and travel, interpreting newly discovered worlds. When encountering resistance, occupation and conquest became just wars. All stories begin here. This island functions as a laboratory, providing a foundation for observation and comparison—a comparative basis that simultaneously carries universal significance.
After all, what land on this earth is not an island?
* Note: The original Chinese text of this essay was reposted in the exhibition volume "Ocean and the Interpreter: 2019-2023" (ed. Nobuo Takamori; Taipei: Chew's Culture and Education Foundation, 2024), following its initial appearance on [ARTalks](https://taishinart.org.tw) and [ARTouch](https://artouch.com). An official museum translation is preserved by the [Hong-gah Museum](https://hong-gah.org.tw). This layout presents the author's independent English translation, featuring localized stylistic adaptations and personal revisions.