“You don’t always see me, but I am always here.”
“I’ll always be with you until the day you stop trusting me.”
“And yet I never know when that will be.”
During the early time when martial law was imposed in Taiwan, textbooks were used as a medium of political propaganda. State leaders were depicted and glorified in school textbooks as respected figures of historical significance, and students must read their stories in class as part of the way of learning the Chinese language.
This piece makes use of scrawling commonly seen in textbooks, where young students tend to modify and extend the illustrations, texts or phonetic symbols with creative drawings. The texts and the phonetic symbols, i.e. the meaning and the pronunciation of a word, seem complementary and yet mismatched. At the same time when a sound of a word is heard, the meaning quietly betrays the sound. An hypothesis of obedience, as it is.