There are all kinds of gaps and seams in the prison environment, be it crevices and door seams towards the outside of prison cells or gaps and openings created by cell window bars. They constituted the everyday landscape in the eyes of political prisoners. However, phonetically speaking, the meaning of the Mandarin character “縫” is twofold: when pronounced in the fourth tone, the character denotes crevices, openings or gaps; but when pronounced in the second tone, it is used as a verb that means “mending” or “sewing.” The work is based on such a contronymic concept to respond to the contradictory relationship between the political prisoners in White Terror and the state power.
Jun-Yuan Hong films the process of a political prisoner’s failed jailbreak. After a tortuous, oppressive and suffering journey, as he gazes into the sea at the exit, the escape eventually becomes a self-contradictory exhaustion. In addition, memories of Tu Nan-Shan, a White Terror victim who was imprisoned on Green Island, are interwoven with the political imprisonment of Lin Bi, the great-great-grandfather of actor Sing-Ho Yeung, overlapping life stories and metaphorical narratives from different eras.