Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

We never look directly at ourselves, just as we never stare straight at the sun.

We always see the person called “I” through shadows, reflections, others’ gazes, or fragmented memories. This perspective is always delayed, indirect, and meta-referential. Although we experience the world from a first-person perspective, we recall ourselves from a third-person point of view, as if we are outside time, observing a past version of ourselves.

Memory is never neutral. It is not merely a representation of the past but an ongoing process of selection and formation. Every time we look back, we are simultaneously choosing what to preserve and what to discard: remembering and forgetting, speaking and remaining silent. These choices not only shape an individual’s self-narrative but also constitute the conditions of our relationships with others. Thus, memory is more than just a psychological mechanism; it is a practice that involves ethics and power.

This exhibition uses the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” as a framework to explore how we understand memory. When individuals cannot be certain about others’ choices, they tend to choose the safest option—such as withholding, altering, or even suppressing memories.[y1.1] However, it is this self-protective tendency that gradually causes our collective reality to break down. We might be isolated for sharing our memories or become accomplices by remaining silent. As a result, memory becomes a strategic action, and in mutual denial and oblivion, we find ourselves caught in a game structure from which there is no escape.

Under contemporary technological conditions, memory functions as multiple formative mechanisms that often conflict with one another. It can be supplemented within fragmentation, validated and shifted via media, projected and reconstructed through history and faith, or it may persist in forms that resist full expression within trauma and relationships. Memory no longer merely points to a fixed, stable past; instead, it is continually translated, displaced, or generated across different frameworks. This exhibition seeks to blur the boundaries between the artworks and the exhibition itself, highlighting that creation is a continuous process throughout the exhibition and amid evolving relationships, rather than a finished product. As a result, the exhibition not only showcases memory but also acts as a space where memory is actively constructed and transformed.

In this space, viewing is not just a means of gaining understanding but an act of intervening in memory; memory itself becomes more than mere recollection—it is an ongoing struggle against oblivion.

Ultimately, we become prisoners, witnesses, and participants with uncertain positions within the game of memory.