Lydia Chang

The Intangible Walls

Walls are usually built to divide. There are these boundaries created by us to serve our own desire.

Modern life depends upon technology so much that its openness and transparency make us lose privacy. In a world where efficiency is virtuous, representation is preferred and illusion is normalised, a person is condemned to find his own meaning. He does so not so much from passively receiving information; rather, he seeks to imagine it in a way that serves his own desire. The irrelevance that individuals feel within society amplifies day by day. Astray from the collective, individuals are searching for a solitary life. Within this context, humans are seeking a balance between these contradicting forces in their inner self.

The long history of Taiwan has involved bittersweet stories of the colonisers and the colonised. At the end of the 19th century, Taiwan went from one’s colony to another’s under Japanese rule; Taiwanese people’s privacy and rights were further denied. 1921 marked the year when Taiwanese military resistance turned to non-violent cultural resistance. In the same year, the Taiwanese Cultural Association was founded as the leading force against Japanese colonisers. These events house the dialogue; through dialogue, one imagines. Imagination then becomes a physical manifestation of what’s eternal.

The project is about two buildings, one in the year 1921 and the other one in 2021.

This is a project that makes walls through openings and they house dialogue.

Light as the intangible wall dissolving the boundary and hierarchy of a space. The publicity and privacy  are read on a gradient. The form of light lights up a territory where you can choose to jump in and out, moving freely between the ‘walls’. There is no physical boundary within individual spaces. Light becomes an ambiguous spatial division; a tool to orchestrate the spatial arrangement through different forms, darkness, lightness and ever-changing phenomena. The spatial organisation would change through time. The interior space is like a landscape of light opening to interpretation and indeterminate in function. Light as a language. The activity follows where the space is lit up. It immediately draws one space into many.

Light is about a spatial presence with the ability for different readings. It is the language between individual and space, space and time. Language is the house of being. In its home, human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

A space grants freedom, seduction, imagination, letting go…