Winter, 2018, distrait as I was, I came to Berlin alone for a half-year stay. It was the first time I felt deeply of the change due to time and space variation. The strangeness of objects in new environment seized me with a chilling clarity. As I reassure the space and objects, my sense of cognition seemed to become acute and misty at the same time. It reminded me of the Ocean Chart in The Hunting of the Snarkby Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. It was an almost blank map with only a double-framed rectangle and marks of latitude, direction and propositional scale. In the story, people set off their journey to conquer space, yet one cannot conquer space itself as one already exists within the space. At the same time, the map marks the margin of the world. Thus, these two things form a weird yet imaginative relationship: to conquer a space, the space has to exist somewhere, but the map frames an unsurmountable barrier; one’s bodily action wishes to arrive the destination yet the boundary remains untouchable.

The Second Place marks the first place as the beginning point, which defines the location of another place. My imagination of somewhere unfolds, from the differences between the time and space of these two places, transforming materiality into spatiality. The Second Placetherefore remains a spot of imagination locating within the margin of time and space, divided by the sight from beginning point to the end point. Like the Ocean Chart, no matter how close we are to the original scene, or how hard we try to look afar from the mirror, altering the reality itself is an ineffective romantic imagination. We assume somewhere to look like something yet we are never able to touch the place we’ve already seen.

The Second Place was first made in Berlin and then documented in Taiwan. In this series, I attempt to change the boundary of space through printing, mirroring, projecting and paper. I print out image on part of the surface of mirror, and I project an image of wall on curtain, which flutter back and forth to complete the shape of a wall. Thus, from Berlin to Taiwan, from substance to mirroring, within the two places and spaces, the artwork’s visual arrangement reveals their subtle nuances. And I imagine some passages exist within the works and these passages might open up possibilities of visual cognition.