/ The Gesture of Being

Through the choices we make in action, we determine the traces our existence leaves behind.

A line drawn over twenty years, a vase mended over twenty years, a legend embroidered across 950 centimeters—when walking, mending, embroidery, and photography cease to be merely artistic techniques and become modes of writing through which artists respond to history, identity, and impermanence, every act of repeated labor becomes a reflection on—and a choice about—how life is lived and how we exist.

The Gesture of Being brings together significant works by five mid-career Asian artists—Shi Jin-Hua, Yeesookyung, Chang En-Man, Yeh Wei-Li, and Charwei Tsai. Drawing upon their distinct lived experiences and cultural backgrounds, the artists develop five different modes of writing. The exhibition seeks to safeguard those lived processes that cannot be accelerated, easily replicated, or replaced. More than an exhibition about acts of writing, it considers how, amid continual change and disappearance, one might consciously shape an entire life into a profound form of existence.

Shi Jin-Hua writes the expenditure of life through walking and bodily labor. Yeesookyung joins discarded ceramic fragments with gold-leaf seams, transforming fractures into new narratives. Chang En-Man replaces brush and ink with the path of the needle, reclaiming the historical agency of Indigenous peoples. Through photography, literature, and site-based practice, Yeh Wei-Li reveals how memory is continually overwritten and layered. Charwei Tsai inscribes Buddhist scriptures onto ephemeral sand and natural materials, contemplating impermanence through processes of formation and dissolution.

Set within the historical continuum embodied by ALIEN Art Centre, the exhibition draws upon Roland Barthes’s reflections on the “gesture” as its curatorial point of departure. What writing truly leaves behind, the exhibition proposes, may not be the finished text, but the resonance and traces of the act itself. From this perspective, it asks how writing can carry and transmit lived experience. At a time when the production of text approaches zero cost and the creations of civilization are increasingly reduced to data to be rearranged and recombined, the exhibition preserves contexts that can still be traced and understood—through the movements of the hand, the labor of the body, the transformation of materials, the residue of memory, and the sedimentation of place.