Late mornings and sleepless nights. Frustration. Anxiety.
They seem to have infiltrated our consciousness and entered our dreams. We recognize the shape of eaves, the folding line of streets, and return to our dwelling coordinates where we hide and live. We see restless men and women in full feather wandering through the brightly-lit city and then sitting shoulder to shoulder with countless strangers, between countless walls.
In the 1970s, urbanism started paving its way into Taiwan. Bidding farewell to the landscape of an agricultural society, life thus became crowded and repressive in cities. The meaning of “urbanism” does not merely lie in towering skyscrapers but in altered landscapes, living conditions, isolation and loneliness as well as increasingly complex social issues. Submerged in the capitalist system, every person has been assumed as a tiny component, whose labor force is needed by the whole mechanism, but not with one’s individuality as well.
However, the construction of liberalism constantly reminds us of our own subjectivity, along with the importance of being viewed as a whole. Such contradictory values leads to extreme unease and confusion that keeps building up and ceaselessly floods our minds with external chaos. As worries that never subside loom over us, we are forced to retreat to our dwellings, where we are perfectly alone, and safe. We can uninhibitedly be ourselves – yet under the lingering dark cloud of sorrows.
Frustrating questions as “Who am I?” seem to return in lonesome nights, invariably. When night falls, myriads of dazzling lights glisten in innumerous windows at the near distance. Gazing into the dreamlike, transient light, we recall things we hope to seal for good in our troubled mind. We question again and again, about what role we should be playing to integrate into the society but still maintain the integrity of our own subjectivity.
A Dark Cloud of Sorrow Looms Over features eight selected pieces and delineates the question of how people, as individuals, should coexist with others, a question deriving from urbanites’ perceptual conflicts experiences.