Toilets available
Traces
This installation traces how memory travels across generations, and how silence can shape identity as deeply as words. It began with the diaries of my grandfather, my mother, and myself, three voices bound by blood yet separated by war, time, and social change in Taiwan. My grandfather’s migration as a soldier during the Chinese Civil War left unspoken wounds; my mother’s diaries reveal the quiet resilience of a woman navigating Taiwan’s industrial boom; my own notes echo a restless generation in search of new ground.
The work itself is my diary, written in response to my family’s diaries and translated into a spatial experience. It becomes a constellation of memory where handwriting fades, a voice continuously questions and answers itself, and light seems to breathe and flow. Rather than following a linear history, the audience drifts through layers of presence and absence, sensing how intimate memories reverberate within collective forgetting.
By interweaving physical diaries with digital traces, the installation asks how private writing can resist erasure, and how family stories can expand into larger questions of displacement, cultural identity, and belonging. It is less a story told than a space to dwell in—the tension between what chooses to stay and what inevitably flees.
