“Hey, I’m Back” and “I’m Heading Out for a Bit”: On Chiu Ching-Ting’s Living Room: A Fiber within the Family Narratives
By Lin Kai-Lun
English Translation:
Eli Chen
It depends on how you slice it. Or, perhaps, on how it slices you.
Opening: Doors are Blades, and a Partition
I do not know what the door to each reader’s home looks like. Mine has two. One belongs to my grandparents: a burgundy metal door that takes effort to push open, its red paint scraping against the ground, leaving faint marks over the years. It has grown rusty with age, and when moved, it screeches—a sound like fingernails against a chalkboard. My grandparents never fully shut that door; they are constantly waiting for someone to come home. So I, too, learned not to push it all the way—too loud—and instead slip in quietly, closing it gently.
The opening and closing of a door is an invitation, a share of privacy.
Yet, a door can also be a guillotine.
As a child, my fingers were once caught between the burgundy blades, the bruise beneath my nail scorched, as if a needle, burnt fiery, had pinned itself into the narrow seams between nail and skin.
The other door is a rolling shutter, slowly lowering from above. It is home to my father and my slumber. Its opening in the morning meant business had begun; its closing at night, the ritual of rest. There is a certain liminality — a threshold to cross — when home also serves as a storefront. From the third floor to the first, I would ponder what to wear, how loud the music could play, always aware that the street seeps in, even through the dust that gathered in the cracks of our windows. Dust that carried whispers of our private life, out into the open.
Home is the boundary between the private and the public, the last line of defense for intimacy. Yet most homes, too, harbor a few exhibitionists of their own.
I guess it is because home is built by people, and its people, we call “family”.
The First Living Room
I stepped into Chiu Ching-Ting’s living room at Absence Space. First came a door — a bronze floor-to-ceiling frame that revealed the history of the house. Doorframes carry their unique meanings: white aluminum for the early days, bronze for the blooming years of Taiwanese economics, and for the modern days, a thick, airtight window. Crossing in, my first thought was, “Should I take my shoes off?” — the unspoken etiquette of a guest entering another’s home. I deliberately stepped on the black, avoiding the white draped curtains, wary of carrying the grit of the outside world into someone else’s home. Yet here, the path was white, and the ground beneath black.
Between those white draped curtains, shaped into couches, were words about growing up, about movement, about the many ways people talk about “home.” Sofas and living rooms are where families gather — the shared spaces inside private rooms, open yet intimate. We call it a living room, but really, it is a family room.
To watch television in the living room.
To daydream in the living room.
To relax in the living room.
Every corner of the living room belonged to its host. I circled the space, wandering toward a hidden place. There, I found a book.
A secret exists in relation to what is public. It is what could not be told to others. And yet, a secret is exposing — when revealed willingly, it becomes a gift, an exchange of trust.
That book, tucked in a corner behind the curtains, was the space between couch cushions—where cookie crumbs end up, where loose change slips through, where little pieces of yourself get left behind without noticing. We sit on a couch, and parts of us inevitably sink into its body.
Is a home a living organism? Or is it the people within who keeps it alive? No — perhaps I have simply forgotten things there. Perhaps I simply tucked away a secret somewhere. I can not say for sure. But it must still have been here, in this home.
Wearing their watch in reverse, or even adjusting the second hand back by a moment, it wouldn’t have mattered. For them, the concept of time was never bound to punctuality. Time held significance only when spent alone in a darkroom, or when there were but oneself to keep company. A watch was adorned for the perception of others, and served as a reminder to oneself of the world’s incessant passing. — Chiu Ching-Ting
They flipped through them in the living room they never left, scoffing at the past, adjusting their watch, but the hands fell off, unsure on which side to awake. — Chiu Ching-Ting
Home is shared. So is time. And so are watches.
The relationship between a watch and time was never a question of which came first, like the chicken or the egg. The same could be said of “home.” A home began when people gathered, and from their gathering, rules emerged. Time was one of those rules—so were personal rooms, living rooms, and dining rooms.
Wandering and Fleeing
I wandered through Absence Space, through Living Room: A Fiber within the Family Narratives
From the exhibition to a kitchen smudged with colors, I climbed the stairs—the steps in this multi-story house stirred memories of my family of origin. To me, the words “family of origin” sound like profanity. To refer to one’s kin as “family of origin”, often signals misfortune. I climbed the steep stairs, pausing at the landing as if to catch my breath, as if hope, too, had stopped there with me. On the second floor, outside a room, a sign read “No Entry Without Permission”. I had trespassed into this space, careful to respect the boundaries between household privacy and the public. I walked a little further down the corridor, peeking through windows and doors that weren’t fully shut. I was still wandering along the thread of family stories—slightly anxious, perhaps, because I was a guest. Guests, after all, belong in the living room.
Back on the first floor, I returned to the second living room—the one that belonged to the exhibition hall itself. Low wooden chairs, a small oval coffee table. Two people sat there eating, soup sealed in plastic bags, paper bowls scattered close by. There was no television. They did not face each other deliberately, but sat wherever they felt most at ease, as if at home. Living room sofas are almost always arranged in three sides, never a perfect rectangle. There is no fourth wall to break. But does anyone watch? If someone were observing us in this living room, would it feel embarrassing?
I listened to the exhibition film while also listening to the second living room.
The clatter of chopsticks, the soft slurp of soup, a casual offer — “Do you want a drink?” — the snap of a phone unlocking, laughter, the slap of slippers as someone got up to walk.
When one of them stepped into my part of the space, they opened the bathroom door. I kept my eyes fixed on the screen, yet I knew — they were only there to wash their hands.
We were in the same place, scattered across its little pockets of space, quietly sharing an unspoken understanding.
"Take your time," Ching-Ting said to me.
Then she introduced herself.
And so I introduced myself too. A moment of awkwardness — it felt anything but homely.
The Ubiquity of Home
As I eased into the space, before me played the voices of Chao You-Syuan and Huang Yu-Ting, narrating their own life experiences — of homes, of leaving and returning, of migrations across chapters of their lives. At that moment, I realized: home is like radiation, its side effects unknowable.
In their stories — in the dissonant yet intimate details of those foreign places — I felt how my own family, too, radiates quietly within me. How are we socialized? Beyond family upbringing, perhaps it is in the lessons of estrangement, it lies in the spillovers, the strangeness, the sense of foreignness. When we are socialized, do we call it “growing up”? And how do we grow up? The clearest answer is to simply laugh and say: “I don’t know.”
The ubiquity of home was that unsettling mix of discomfort, excitement, and fear that came with falling into a foreign space. And contradictively, the ubiquity of home was also what allowed one to unwind.
In the back seat of my family’s car, motion-sick and moaning that I might throw up. Someone would pat my back on the roadside while another barked, “Hurry up already!” I knew there was no malice in their words—only unfiltered bluntness.
I listened as she said that childhood was a blur, those elusive family outings, that childhood was a fog—everything misty and ungraspable.
I thought of my own early years: the daily fifteen-minute kindergarten commute, sitting in a massive American RV with red leather seats, the back rows big enough to lie down in. Seven kilometers felt like an eternity. I remember nothing my parents said in those moments, only the final intersection before reaching school. After dropping me off, they would turn back toward the city, a place they longed for and stayed. A place I always wanted to tailgate with them, but never belonged.
As I grew older, I learned to play the clever child in those very places that once made me so uneasy.
Seven kilometers—how much of my six-year-old life was spent on that stretch of road? That commute made up half of my day. Half of my day spent, fatherless, motherless, without a trace of family.
And so, my childhood was forgotten, buried underneath what my parents called “busyness.”
The rare long trips we took felt like road journeys—Taichung to Kenting—where, no matter how carsick I became, I had to swallow the nausea. That was what it meant to be a good kid.
I have forgotten much of my childhood.
What remains are images, shaky as handheld footage.
How could I ever know whether what stayed behind was shadow, or light?
To Return, or Just to Linger?
Before leaving Living Room: A Fiber within the Family Narratives, I thought about how I should leave.
Hiding behind the sofa, I read Ching-Ting’s words and told her a few things about her writing. She said she would keep at it.
We crossed paths behind the sofa — a crevice of the home, a little world where no one governs.
This small exhibition held four living rooms: one for the exhibition, one for projection and self-narration, one in between, it was real life. The most private of them all was perhaps the leisure space beneath the qilou: an ashtray, yesterday’s leftover cans. All of these were living rooms. A living room isn’t built for guests but by its host. Whoever is there becomes the host; wherever they stand becomes home.
When it came time to leave this home, I slipped away quietly. I didn’t speak to anyone inside, didn’t leave anything behind — just a casual exit, like stepping out of the house on a daily basis.
“I’m heading out for a bit. Bye.”