/ The Gesture of Being I：Yeh Wei-Li, Shi Jin-Hua

The Gesture of Being

This exhibition seeks to reconsider the meaning of “writing-ness,” and to explore how writing might extend beyond text, information, and visual representation.

In his discussion of the work of Cy Twombly, Roland Barthes introduced the concept of the gesture, suggesting that what writing reveals is not the final text, but the resonance and trace left behind by an action.

Drawing on Barthes’ notion of the gesture, The Gesture of Being brings together the works of five artists to explore writing as an act. Through the intervention of the hand, the body, and material processes, time, memory, and repetitive labor are inscribed across different media and sites.

Here, writing is no longer confined to language or form, but becomes an ongoing process of becoming. It is both an individual experience and something that is repeated, displaced, and accumulated across different contexts, forming layered trajectories of existence. What writing leaves behind is not merely a mark, but a trace of being unfolding through time.


Yeh Wei-Li

With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest.

－Patrick Modiano

Yeh Wei-Li works primarily with photography, often centering his practice on the exploration of locality. Through prolonged periods of observation and engagement, he moves beyond the role of a temporary visitor, entering a place through sustained bodily labor and lived experience. His works seek to uncover the distinctive contexts embedded within a site, tracing residual histories and revealing the subtle connections between individual lives and place.

Literature frequently serves as a catalyst for Yeh’s engagement with space. Through reading, he establishes relationships with particular locations, translating his encounters with texts into images and weaving an additional layer of memory onto the landscape.

The five photographic works presented in the gallery are selected from Yeh Wei-Li’s Beitou Palimpsest series. The series originated in 2024, when the artist was invited by the Hong-gah Museum to undertake a project exploring the locality of Beitou.

Taking literature as its point of departure, Beitou Palimpsest explores how the character of a place might be rendered through images. At the museum’s suggestion, Yeh selected Hao Yuxiang’s autobiographical essay Hot Springs Wash Away Our Sorrows, together with Old Stories of the Northern City, as textual references to which he responded through photography. Through this process, he sought to connect the shared and divergent experiences of writer and reader, gradually developing a narrative structure through which the idea of “place” could emerge.

Here, photography functions as a palimpsestic response to the texts. The scenes depicted extend from Shuimandong, where Yeh resides, to Gunma Prefecture in Japan. Moving across distinct geographical and cultural contexts, the artist identifies visual situations that resonate with those described in Hao’s writing, allowing different layers of memory to intersect and overlap. Among the works, An-Chan and Suitcase correspond to narrative moments and atmospheric details within the text, while My Neighborhood, Echo’s Hand, and Why Do “Jao” and “Wo” Look So Similar? reflect the artist’s position as a reader. They reveal how his own sense of time and lived experience respond to the texts, transforming reading into a renewed act of writing.

Through this process, the artist gradually came to understand locality itself as a palimpsest—a layered accumulation of memories overlapping across time. It possesses no fixed form; rather, it is continuously reshaped and regenerated through repeated acts of reading, remembering, and representation, unfolding through deviation, imagination, and expectation.


Shi Jin-Hua

“If a pencil could be a person’s entire life, then in the long cycle of birth and death, what kind of life-line have I repeatedly walked?”

— Shi Jin-Hua

Shi Jin-Hua (1964–2024) was born in Penghu, Taiwan, and is regarded as one of Taiwan’s most significant conceptual and performance artists. Diagnosed with diabetes at the age of seventeen, he spent the rest of his life measuring blood sugar levels and administering daily insulin injections. Living with chronic illness for decades, acts of measurement, repetition, and disciplined ritual became central elements of his artistic practice, reflecting an ongoing inquiry into the nature of existence. Buddhist thought also profoundly shaped his work. The suffering of the body, experienced as a form of confinement, was transformed through spiritual reflection and ultimately rearticulated through the language of conceptual and performance art.

In Pen Walking #1, Shi Jin-Hua repeatedly drew lines across sheets of paper with pencils until they were completely consumed, completing the work by affixing the pencil shavings to the surface. This method originated in 1994, while he was studying in the United States. One day, while writing in his journal, he noticed that a pen he had used for years was nearing the end of its life. He took out a sheet of paper and drew irregular lines until the pen was fully exhausted. This work marked the beginning of the Pen Walking series and established a method that would inform his lifelong practice: the complete consumption of a writing instrument on a single surface as a metaphor for the span of a life.

In Pencil Walker, Shi held a pencil against a wall and repeatedly walked back and forth, using the movement of his body to draw lines. Each performance followed strict parameters governing its spatial range and duration. As he walked, he chanted and periodically sharpened the pencil using a sharpener attached to his arm. Each session lasted two hours and fifteen minutes; over a period of twenty years, he completed sixty walks.

For Shi, walking was a form of writing. The body became an instrument, while the artist assumed the role of a pilgrim, leaving traces through repetitive physical labor and inscribing both the expenditure of life and the near-futile condition of human existence. The dense layers of graphite accumulated across the monumental wall visualize the intensity of his will and physical endurance. These marks embody his persistent questioning of life and existence, transforming walking and writing into acts of reflection and disciplined practice. What ultimately remains is the trace of his presence within each moment of concentrated attention.

Shi also consistently documented his conceptual and performance-based works, preserving their processes through photographs, videos, and other visual materials. These records allow future viewers to encounter traces of the original actions and intentions from which the works emerged.