The Point of Return—On Chiu Ching-Ting’s Living Room
By Chen Cing-Lun
English Translation:
Eli Chen
Across that road was a primary school. It was a tiny campus, so small it could be taken in with a single glance. Everyone in my grandmother’s family had graduated from there. By the school gate, though I cannot recall when, a juice shop had appeared with its black signboard. For a time, it was immensely popular. Its signature was to serve juice in tall transparent bottles, each liquid settling into layers of color according to its density. Every drink bore a name drawn from its hues: Sunrise, Love, Fire. A pale violet dissolving into white was called Moonlight, while blues and orange hues were named after seasons.
We might imagine it this way: when some incident sets memory in motion, and that memory takes root within us, a person becomes like a layered drink.
In such a moment, it is as if two kinds of time coexist within the same body. And if we follow the thought further, we see that what sinks into the depths must do so because it carries a heavier density of time.
The more it accumulates, the more distant it becomes. As it should be. So when a long-buried memory suddenly returns with the freshness of its first appearance, it brings about the only reversal possible. And with it arrives a bodily unease born of excess.
A breach of the everyday. Perhaps pain, perhaps numbness, or perhaps—like in Chiu Ching-Ting’s earlier work—the dizziness that stretches forward from childhood into later years. In the exhibition space, a once-intact car has been dismantled, leaving only a door and an empty window frame. The projected image blurs at its edges; the figure on screen is not me, but a likeness, a simulation of memory’s form, gazing across the larger space at another new work.
This is what one sees upon opening the door: a white sofa, floating on the carpet. Behind it, as if left behind, rests the same nine-square grid, Checkerboard Cake, the novel. A brown carpet carves a path along the wall, leading toward the far end of the kitchen. Through cellophane, the light inside is dim and warm, like a living room with no lamps switched on. Above, the ceiling fan turns idly. Grandparents, just finished with their meal, lie down on the floor for a nap. This too is the tone of the projection cast upon the sofa: a brief spill of outdoor light slipping through the doorway. In the living room, I sat on the television, watching the sofa.
In full light, I see the doorbell set in its metal box. It reminds me of fingertips and a funnel. Beyond the long alley, the whole world unfolds: daylight, and with it, sudden flashes of light, like pentagons, all pouring through the funnel’s narrowest point. It is a quiet alley, too. Birds call outside the frame. A baby drifts between waking and sleep, and the playful voices ring hollow, becoming the loudest sound of all.
In the corner where I crouch in stillness, an empty yet inviting space rises up around me, enclosing me.
But my thoughts have already wandered elsewhere, a place of my own. Back in college, before a mirrored wall in the basement, I opened the map on my computer. I crouched, then sat cross-legged, and found home farther to the south than I had expected. My finger traced the roads I once took to school. Into the city: first, the high school I arrived at, then the neighboring middle and elementary schools—now vanished from the satellite image, replaced by a flat expanse of ruins. My finger traced the road, as if walking, continuing toward the sea, and in an old shop not far from my grandmother’s house, I had a bowl of fish-skin soup.
These thoughts did come to me, and for no reason I became aware of a lasting entrapment. My heart finds ease in letting each new moment be overlapped with a layer of the past. Disordered, uneven in density, chaotic and inverted. When I long to speak of it to someone, I still press my gaze close. Before a light that is faint yet constant, its truth cannot be described as it truly is.
I still often think of “realism”: the nineteenth-century Russian novel, which carried the weight of historical record, unfolding at great length to present to the residents of a single region—a city of only tens of thousands—the vast Russian reality that most could not comprehend.
With a certain tone of reportage—Tolstoy’s “facts” that make the reader believe, Nabokov called it a “precise imitation”—the novel records those things no longer subject to change, not simply for the sake of depiction or for any fragmentary account of objective reality. What it points toward is often an inner truth—concerning the condition of human existence—a possibility of a better world, more ideal and more securely bound to the collective.
The more fictional, the more it resembles reality. A writer, with a distant gaze, ponders how what has already happened should be remembered. Thus, creation is, through one’s many perspectives, a constant attempt to approach that revolving moment—yet at the same time, there is no assurance of it.
So it is. Independent of success or failure, such moments cannot help but bring a kind of sorrow.
Once one realizes one is looking through a particular kind of eye, the floating sofa comes to resemble a ghost.
A ghost of childhood: the view nearly dissolved by dizziness in the back seat of a car, where only the white cloth fluttering at the window remains like a retinal afterimage, faintly glowing, drawing time into a circle, the origin point of every return. The house, in this sense, perhaps serves as a special marker within time—rooted in the earth, immense and impossible to remove in full, and once we have left home, those who remain behind become a more enduring testimony.
In the theater piece A Kind of Storyline, the actors Huang Yu-Ting and Chao You-Syuan each play themselves, opening conversation from their own pasts. Following the flow of time, beginning with the meaning of their names, they move into layered spaces, concluding at last in a contrapuntal relation within time. In recalling home, both turn their gaze toward the past—toward places that can never again be entered, and toward dwellings of memory whose permanence no one can ever be sure of.
Even so, these places—though already gone—still retain, like visions, the nourishment a child once needed to grow into an adult. So long as we wish it, even ruins can summon traces of life. The periwinkle greens again, the wash-water from rice is set once more on the windowsill for watering flowers, someone is still busy in the kitchen; the slip of paper on the altar table, visited again and again by thieves; the rose oil carefully prepared for Christmas stockings appears more than once, still able to make us laugh.
Through forced displacements and countless upheavals, some anchor their sense of solace in a hidden room behind an ordinary house, reached by climbing walls and winding alleys; others extend the image of home outward to the large park beyond the childhood home, seeking that first abundance of light, never shadowed.
Without order, memory splices and collages, highlights at will, shifts its focus near and far. Its modes change freely, swelling and branching in response to the words before us. The standard of speech is only the self, and so every sentence is true—an indifferent mother, or a gravely ill father. The fractures and reconciliations within relationships, the sensations of the body. Death, or as in Schulz’s novels, the presence of fathers after death.
Memory itself holds a difference in speed; reality, a difference in time; and emotion, a difference in signals that can never be fully known in the present. Together they build a kind of lucid freedom of narration. All the stories not yet spoken may continue to shift, until one day they arrive at the single version that feels most reconciled.
With this freedom, the theater draws on shared experience, gathering the seemingly scattered ends of dialogue, drawing them close, fusing them into a subtle solidity—a hidden balance that underlies every working of memory on “home.” The same balance holds across longer spans of time, dissolving the contrapuntal pairs: outer truth and inner truth, home and movement, the first and the last, presence and absence—all seeming to fade, like the blocks of ice placed in corners of the stage to mark the space of memory.
Back to the beginning of the performance: a side door opens, the actors step onto the stage, standing among the many lamps set lower than the waist. The dialogue begins: “It’s far too bright here.” “Anyway, there was never anything to begin with.”
Nothing, at all, made the place of origin. A point from which one departs endlessly, and to which one endlessly returns.
Einstein’s Dreams: “The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone, for past life cannot be joined to present life. Each person, trapped in the flow of time, is trapped there alone.” Yet, fortunately, this is not stillness. In such returns, I cannot help but feel the balance that the work seeks to draw, must be bound closely to life itself: gently, steadfastly, reaching toward that bright white future almost too dazzling to stare into.
In such a landscape, memory, perhaps, truly can cease to bring sorrow.