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Project 2 STAIRS
The captions in STAIRS operate like misaligned instructions embedded inside familiar cinematic moments. They do not describe the films directly so much as expose latent spatial or emotional movements already present within them, then twist those movements into a directive that feels both accurate and slightly wrong. Each pairing creates a kind of friction between what the film shows and what the caption insists. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), the caption “ALL THE WAY DOWN” is a reference to the famous Odessa Steps sequence. The relentless descent of bodies, carriage, and chaos down the monumental staircase becomes an image of collective collapse. Inception (2010), captioned “GO AROUND”, shifts attention to the film’s obsession with architectural paradoxes and dream logic. Mazes that fold into themselves, staircases that loop impossibly, corridors that refuse linear navigation. Joker (2019), I captioned Arthur Fleck’s unstable bodily presence, especially his iconic stair dance “FALL DOWN”. Falling is no longer an accident but propulsion, an inevitability and a descent mistaken for direction. Psycho (1960): “UP ONLY” is an ironic insistence on ascent within a narrative structured by repression, doubling, and buried violence framed by the Bates Motel staircase In Labyrinth (1986), “GET LOST” is almost too precise. The film itself is structured as intentional disorientation: corridors that shift, staircases that lead nowhere stable, space that reorganizes itself around confusion. Finally, The Truman Show (1998) has the clearest directive: “LEAVE”. The word is both instruction and rupture, echoing Truman’s final movement toward the collapse of a fake world built around him.
Project 1 Cartographies of Home
This triptych reflects on the experience of growing up abroad as a child of expatriates, where the idea of “home” was always temporary. Moving between houses in the same neighborhood meant that place was never fixed; each address held a fragment of a life that was constantly shifting. During a visit back over winter break, I returned to several of the houses my family once lived in across the same neighborhood in Taiwan. Although the buildings still stand, they no longer hold the lives that once unfolded inside them. I photographed these houses and overlaid fragments of maps to trace the spatial relationship between them, revealing how close they were geographically, yet how distant they feel in memory. The upper portions of each panel show the present-day houses as they exist now. The lower sections interrupt these images with bold fields of color where I mask out the current reality and insert personal memories from living there as a child. These inserted photographs act as small windows into moments that no longer physically exist: playing, resting, and everyday scenes of my childhood life. By partially obscuring the buildings, I want to acknowledge how memory both preserves and distorts the past. The map lines that run across the panels are emotional topographies, tracing invisible routes between the houses and the lives that unfolded within them. For many expatriate children, identity is constructed through a patchwork of temporary homes rather than a single place of origin. The houses themselves have changed: new paint, different residents, altered surroundings, but the memories remain layered onto these sites. By masking the present and reconstructing fragments of the past, I hope to reclaim spaces that once shaped my sense of home.
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