Chen Hsin-yu

A voyage to the northern border of Taiwan — the eponymous Beigu Islet, a sea rock roughly 300sqft submerged under water half of the time — delves into regional histories, the gaze on borderline landscapes, and the ambivalent state of Taiwanese territory and subjectivity.

The gentle gestures enacted by large-scale machines subvert our notions of the domestic, imagining industrial equipment as bodies in a home rather than the machines that construct the spaces we inhabit daily.

On Super 8 film, 15m equals 2.5 minutes. Outside the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Paris, the filmmaker walked this length in one shot. This forced synchronicity of film, time, and space examines standardization, adaptation, and embodied experience.

A hand-scratched text film, a constitutional transcription, a misaligned translation, and a legal code of undefined territory, carved at 24 frames per second within Taiwan’s ongoing troubled history.

The refracted gaze on Mianhua Islet, Taiwan's eastern de facto border, turns the concrete landscape of physical territory into a mirage of topography and politics. The fragmented image of the frontier reflects the ambivalent state of Taiwanese subjectivity. The camera slowly sweeps over the contour of the islet as if touching the country's body to ensure its existence. The ever-imaginary border that eludes, obscures, and fictionalizes the construction of a nation confronts us with its external mirrored image, as a subject and as a site, where the process and paradox of forming national subjectivity are materialized, embodied, and caught in a liminal space.