Artist’s statement: Even When Our Shouts Fall Out of Sync (力求失真的嗓音)

This exhibition includes the #Ghostkeepers on-site at the Mi-Hak Gwan gallery space and the 2016, the earliest version of my film Writing the Time Lag, where at the later of this page you can see the QR code link to it. — I started to shoot this experimental documentary after the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan, and during the field research it interviewed many Taiwanese Indigenous queer and women. I’d like to mention that — as a non-Indigenous, it was difficult for me to speak in these processes. And as a matter of fact, I have always found it hard to speak. — At the moment when I am writing this artist statement, I had just experienced the #Metoo movement in Taiwan. The survivors found it difficult to speak, and witnesses and stakeholders were attacked when they spoke up. My previous work before Writing the Time Lag is called Waves (2011). During the filming of this short film, I experienced a series of sexual discrimination and violence in the film industry, so severe that I felt I have no immunity to survive in the film industry and have to give up making films when I just won several awards. Therefore, in Writing the Time Lag, I announced to friends around me, “I insisted on having an all-female film crew”. — Even though I was starting with the intention of recording the Indigenous movements after Taiwan's Sunflower Revolution, I ended up unconsciously drawn to the stories of the sexual discrimination and violence in the protests. Between all these years, my projects have been participatory. I feel that a participatory project can be a designed process to let the voice medium not be deprived from people who already have difficulties voice for themselves. However, when the camera was set up, I almost instantly realized that I was betraying them. No matter how I designed the participation process, I had already, and will always, expose their pain to future audiences who might criticize them. — Speaking of striving for an unauthentic voice, on the other hand, in the Indigenous movement, I am always an outsider. No matter the pain I’ve endured in the movement, I always feel that I am not suitable to speak. Sometimes, I inadvertently succumb to the misconception of qualification: No one can speak except the most pained person. But although I am in pain, I am still not qualified enough to speak — regarding the Han Taiwanese’s settler colonial history, my pain should only serve as a humble atonement in silence. What I learned in this process, perhaps, is to give up. I learned to give up cueing in the order of pain. I learned to courageously speak,  because someone still has to say what they see. I learned to give up the embedded idea of original sin that I planted in my identities. When the most painful person doesn't speak, I am allowed to speak, my unauthentic truth. #Ghostkeepers perhaps exists for such a reason, with writers continuing to speak for those who inherited the pain, while also boldly declaring their creative existence: Why do they choose to voice for these lives? Why do they approach these stories in such a way?. I said the 2016 version is the earliest version of Writing the Time Lag, as it is a film I commited to  re-edit every two years, it now has 2016 (20mins), 2019 (50 mins), 2021 (70 mins) versions. I tell many people that this format is a biennial review, as I am standing in the present, looking back at the past passion and political narratives in Taiwan. However, as a film produced after I buried my dream of filmmaking due to sexual harassment, I pondered my decision for the biennial re-editing. The act is actually saying that I hope my future can go back, my future can go back — back to before the sexual violence. During the making of Writing the Time Lag, an elder of the Indigenous movement, Gao Mingzhi, prepared to self-immolate on the last day of his protest trip. He has walked to visit dozens of Indigenous communities around Taiwan, and has suffered vicarious trauma hearing oppression stories from their people. That night, self-immolating in front of the presidential building seemed the only method he could express his anger, sadness, baring and suffering. Another time was when I met shaman Grandma Kating Hongay, who passed away seven days after I interviewed her. I felt that a piece of her soul and will was stored in my camera’s memory card, just like our daily use of Facebook, which will become our digital tomb after we pass away. Grandma Kating Hongay survives and continues to live in the digital medium. Whether it's Writing the Time Lag or #Ghostkeepers, both are dealing with the inability to approach, with participatory process, I am passing this striving, attempting force to approach everyone. We empathize, and we suffer from the vicarious pain, but we hide and then forget ourselves in vicarious pain. It’s hard to remember oneself, and I hope that by doing this work and writing this artist statement today, I can remind myself and the audience of this.