150 Meters of LoveHomePeace

Single Channel Video
18:20
2020

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Started in 2019, and planned as well as realized by Dimension Endowment of Art, this public art project is a collaboration between artist TSUI Kuang-Yu and film director Leading LEE. Setting its background in a society with an unfriendly environment for housing, the film explores the topic of social housing. Interweaving various narratives of individual characters, the work challenges the viewers in their interpretations of a contradiction-ridden social housing space, bringing forth the possibility of alternative rules in life through colliding social values with life.

In a social housing residential building somewhere in Taipei, a track commonly found in a school playing-field is embedded in the twelve-story building due to unknown reasons. As the track goes through numerous architectural spaces, it becomes dissected, distorted—a track that can never fulfill its original purpose for running. However, although it cannot serve as a site of competition, it has become a haven for the disadvantaged minority in a fiercely competitive society. Here, a dysfunctional track meets a group of people struggling to survive. The rules in the social housing building afford its temporary residents a chance to re-organize their life, giving them an alternative new beginning in the competition called life. The flaws of the spatial design reveal how the society’s rules have impacted more than five hundred households, whose lives have crisscrossed in the building. As the track becomes filled with fragments of the residents’ daily life day after day, the truth is revealed—the track never truly exists.

Consequently, every seemingly unreasonable spatial arrangement becomes explainable. We can use our imagination to explain or imagine how the residents live their life and how their living traces re-shape the meaning of this track. Although the residents are selected, if everyone is given a chance to choose how they face their life again, could the flaws found along the track be possibly hint at different exits to transcend self-restrictions and reflect possible ways to turn one’s life around so that the previously separate trajectories of life can be brought together?