Tata Cuts Down the Timescape

A rare pod of futuristic houses lines a semi-abandoned neighbourhood outside Taipei. UFO Houses, featuring oval-shaped contours, manifests a utopian vision of the past: the future is light, colourful, and sentimental.

When a former activist-turned-architect joins a redevelopment project led by his old comrade, now the city mayor, he finds himself wandering through a landscape of demolition, as memory, reality, and the ideals they once shared begin to collapse.

May a building have its own reincarnation? Once upon a time, there's a region of canal's dockyard in the center of Tainan city in Taiwan. Later in 1970s, the canal gradually lost its function and the large residential and commercial mixed mall "China Town" had been built at the site. China Town was once the most prosperous mall in the city, however, by more than three decades of rise and fall, the city's authority planned to demolish the building for urban renewal plan. The China Town makes no exception of those failing shopping malls all around this island. As for those residents who have lived in the China Town for a long time experience most of the death and life of the city.

The refracted gaze on Mianhua Islet, Taiwan's eastern de facto border, turns the concrete landscape of physical territory into a mirage of topography and politics. The fragmented image of the frontier reflects the ambivalent state of Taiwanese subjectivity. The camera slowly sweeps over the contour of the islet as if touching the country's body to ensure its existence. The ever-imaginary border that eludes, obscures, and fictionalizes the construction of a nation confronts us with its external mirrored image, as a subject and as a site, where the process and paradox of forming national subjectivity are materialized, embodied, and caught in a liminal space.

Waking up from a dream, I suddenly find that I have lost my name. I'm scouting around but the world becomes odd and weird, leading me back to somewhere familiar...