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Even When Our Shouts Are Out of Sync
2025/08/09 - 2025/11/16

This exhibition features two works: Writing the Time Lag and #Ghostkeepers. In the early days of making Writing the Time Lag, I listened to a lecture by Taiwanese novelist Wuhe. He said:

I see my literary peers living amidst the rush of competitions, alluring awards, and bewitching opportunities to display themselves. Meanwhile, I find myself petrified when I look externally, unable to develop my own language. Therefore, I made a significant decision for myself: to return to Tamsui [a district in New Taipei City] and seclude myself for ten years. Creation should be joyful. During this time, I conducted field research in my own way. I believe that only through grounded practice can an external theme or idea enter my internal world and mature into my unique language. Creation would then flow naturally, and no longer be a torment or pain.

I remember these words moved me to tears back in 2014 in Chicago, as I envied such a painful yet luxurious resolve. Writing the Time Lag is an experimental documentary I began filming after Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement. I took a leave of absence from art school, worked in Taiwanese political parties and Washington D.C., explored various political spheres. I carried this belief of total artistic immersion and ventured into different fields and environments. Till now it is the tenth year of this luxurious practice. 

Before Writing the Time Lag, my previous work was a short film called Waves (2011). During its filming, I experienced a series of sexism and violence within the film industry so severe that, despite just starting to win some film awards, I had already lost my immunity to survive in the industry. Writing the Time Lag began with the intention of documenting the changes in Taiwanese national identity after Taiwan's Sunflower movement, yet I naturally gravitated towards stories of sexual discrimination and violence in the protests. Using a participatory video approach, I interviewed many Taiwanese indigenous queer individuals and women. For Writing the Time Lag, I declared to my friends and myself: “It must be filmed with an all-female crew.”

The exhibition opens with images and notes accumulated over the past 10 years — fragments of lives that have intersected with my fieldwork. Among these is my record of a senior Indigenous activist who, after visiting numerous Indigenous communities in Taiwan and hearing countless stories of oppression, and perhaps overwhelmed by vicarious trauma – prepared to harm himself in front of the Presidential Office on the last night of the movement. It seemed the only way to manifest the Indigenous communal rage and burden he carried.
There is also footage of Kating Hongay, the grandmother performing a purification ritual at the beginning of the film. She passed away seven days after our interview. In addition to myself, everyone who has participated in this work has stored a piece of their soul, their will, in the memory cards. These past lives exist in the digital realm, first captured in memory cards, then reanimated again as photons that beam into and are absorbed by viewers' retinas through this optical encounter. Just like how social media as well becomes our digital cemetery after death—we live again in the digital world.
These stories propelled me to create #Ghostkeepers. When creators and researchers from various places write social media posts representing souls who have experienced political violence, "resurrecting" them in the digital world—how do these traumas born from passion get heard within the vast historical context and geopolitical landscape? How do historical injustice and intergenerational trauma get inherited and healed in the digital age?

The era has its own will. People dedicate themselves to the glory of their time and resonate with collective grief, but what we need is not the bigger picture—it's time. I once decided to re-edit Writing the Time Lag every few years, resulting in versions from 2016, 2019, and 2021. This format allows me to stand in the present, look back, and reflect on the changes in Taiwan's political narrative and my own positionality every two years. But recently, I realized my behavior was saying: "I hope my future can go back, I hope my future can come back, back to before the sexual violence happened." We empathize and bear vicarious trauma together, yet in these substitute wounds, we hide and forget ourselves.
In recent years, during Taiwan's #MeToo movement, I finally exposed the decade-old experiences from the making of Waves. Even more, as a witness for another sexual harassment case, I saw another side of one of the interviewees from Time Lag. Perhaps with these accumulated experiences, my body has begun to suffer from ailments these past two years, and I can no longer hold these memories tightly, or bear and confront as before.

Perhaps this exhibition attempts to offer the wonky time after a dream—creating reminds me of Urashima Taro, who traversed to the alternative realm of the Dragon Palace. He brings back a forbidden treasure box to the human world and opens it out of temptation. The box reveals that he was gone for at least 100 years and restores his true age as an old man. Like Taro, who covered his face upon confronting this time lag, I also find myself covering my face when memories are projected from the forbidden box. It's not just the shyness of being with the audience in the same time and place, but also the fear of dialectical change in this "present" that is the future.

As creators, like many journalists and humanities scholars who must witness and narrate suffering, we attempt to approach experience, yet can only speak unauthentically. Or perhaps, atop these layered identity struggles that mingle with the chaos of our own pain, we are simply dancing, singing—even when our shouts are out of sync.
 

Artist
Lee Tzu Tung

Lee Tzu Tung is an artist and curator whose work integrates anthropological field research, political action, and economic critique. A graduate of MIT's Master of Architecture program and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Master of Fine Arts program, Lee received the New Artist Society full scholarship and the Transmediale Fellowship. Their work explores how marginalized communities can "queer up" current authoritarian and colonial systems through open-source methods, decentralized tools, and participatory projects. Their work has been widely exhibited in Taiwan and internationally, including at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MIT Museum, University of Lisbon, Transmediale Berlin, Korea Mi-Hak Gwan, Hyundai Motor Studio Beijing, Asymmetry Foundation UK, Beta Festival Ireland, and Skovde Museum Sweden.
Beyond their artistic practice, Lee organized Philo Sophia events in Chicago and New York (2016-2018), participated in the Overseas Taiwanese for Democracy, and helped organize activities including the overseas Taiwanese Anti-Black Box Curriculum protest (2016) and same-sex marriage rallies (2016).