Where You At? A Picture of Distance

“Hey, my friend (hope you’d let me call you like this).

Reading these words now, are you on the way to somewhere, or just staying here for the moment?

Lately in commuting, I’m often a bit upset about my failure in catching the MRT I planned to catch. Even though the next train is just two minutes away, I still long to catch the expected train, which has already arrived at my destination by now. It’s as if a swift arrival to a place is like a mission accomplished, and that makes me complacent somehow. While I savor such ecstasy, I’m also overwhelmed by the rapidity. It seems along the way there’s something missing. Distance has always been blurry to me, and my body can’t even capture its sense of this journey.

Penpal W divulged her anxiety of looking forward to my letter in her correspondence from time to time. The anticipation of my letter seems prolonged. It is perhaps in part because I’m constantly looking forward to W’s reply as well. What a pity that there’s no independent mailbox at my place. The migrant worker who cares for the elderly lady next door can’t read Chinese, either. As I climbed the stairs after entering the apartment’s gate, all kinds of fantasies about anticipation were colliding constantly. Such anticipation was also ascending and extending step by step on my way up. Meanwhile, I might even step on the journey in quest of my letters. This time, the letter is treated as the protagonist of the communication medium. The subject of mobility is no longer my anticipation. Will I be the extension of the letter instead?

As I was picturing what kind of imagination it might trigger and pondering over whether its content or extension has a boundary that night, I got a letter from W. All of a sudden, it was as if through the guesswork and sentimentality, my picture of time difference and distance was restructured. They seemed to give birth to the possibility of a distance, which was so laggard yet so profound.

Where are you at, when you’re reading this?”

Artists: Candy Bird, HO Yen-Yen

The exhibition “Where You At? A Picture of Distance” serves as the collaborative venue of the 2022 EXIT International Art Festival. The exhibition centers around “mobility,” and invites artists Candy Bird and HO Yen-Yen to draw various (likely) slow axes over the trajectories of mobility.