A country is not an area decided by some boundary on a map but an imagined concept identified by its inhabitants. The imagined concept is beyond any social significance. It is an entity bringing assurance to people. The disillusionment of a country comes from political uncertainty. Taiwan is particularly the case. The troubled, disturbing, and unidentified political situation causes us depression and dejection. The doll in the video embodies my imagination of a country. From the first encounter to its death, the story reveals a sense of loss and frustration when someone fails to structure the imagination of a country. The hobo has a home. He lives in the country under the bridge. The rural area opposite to a city is his homeland and his country. The definitions of “country (nation),” “the country,” and inhabitants are intertwined in the scene as derived from the Latin word “contra.”

Here, we are dealing with the loss of collective imagination and the anxiety to reconstruct and to consolidate the identity of a country. We are trying to find the motherland of our emotions and to retrieve the connection between us. I am trying to describe how I approach an imaginary idea which is beyond any geographic boundary when I am dealing with the imagination of a country, especially after my acknowledgement of it. In front of a big concept like it, it is imaginable that one might become speechless. The idea is inexplicable, unreachable, and elusive. Sometimes, it is as intimate as your lover, while sometimes it walks away like a stranger. It varies all the time. Sometimes we have to abandon it or we do not care about it. Sometimes, it is tricky and we find ourselves in an awkward situation if we get involved. Sometimes, we have to care about it because it might disappear any second and it will be replaced immediately. We are looking for the shared emotion: the trauma caused by history and politics. We try to mourn. In our depression, we crave for an imagination of a country, which somehow might extend our spiritual life.

I am looking for any possibility to document the trauma – to transform how an individual confronts the external political power to how we express the emotional politics inside our minds through video, installation, and documents. In my opinion, the relationship is established from both ways. I hope to extend my artistic exploration, manage and transform the preexisting system of life, and reveal the emotions as well as the possible reality hidden behind the appearance through a new perceptive experience. It is how we discover the implicit secret of the collective emotions and experiences.