About

This exhibition begins with Forestry Stories, an earlier work rooted in the forestry history of Luodong. The work grew out of a 1979 fire at a timber factory behind Luodong’s rear train station. From there, the artist traced back the historical ties between Luodong and the forestry industry, taking as entry points an accident at the log pond of the Luodong Forest District and the factory fire. Through the accounts of different people, she pieces together the shape of history from the memories and oral testimonies of people today.

Yet the past can no longer be fully verified; what remains are memories, oral accounts, fragments, imagination and forgetting. The exhibition is therefore not concerned with restoring a single truth, but with how, when the truth cannot be fully restored, we can come to understand that past anew through the act of looking in the present.

(Not) Fully Developed extends this line of thought. “Developing” refers not only to the photographic process, but also to the way history, memory and matter gradually emerge as we look. “Not fully” points to the gaps that always remain in memory and history. When we try to look at the past, what we see is never a complete history, but the fragments left by time, memory and the act of looking.

In this body of work, wood also takes on different identities. Once it leaves the forest and enters the human world, it becomes a material for industrial production and part of domestic life, while carrying the memories of a place’s industry, beliefs and everyday life. The works in the exhibition thus extend from forestry, factories and conveyor systems to an old family house and devotional objects, using different materials and ways of seeing to reconsider how things that have disappeared, changed or cannot be fully restored might surface once again.