Artist Statement for Dust and Halo
by Tan Jui-Wen
This year marks my eighteenth year in Taiwan, exactly half of my life so far. The other half was spent in a small town by an estuary in southern Malaysia, surrounded by old houses from the British colonial era and abundant greenery. My years in Taiwan, by contrast, have been scattered across many different places.
My family runs an architectural firm, so architecture was a familiar part of my childhood and became one of the ways I learned to perceive my surroundings. When I first arrived in Taichung, I found myself surrounded by high rises, dense and cluttered buildings, streams of traffic, and glaring lights. Day after day, life repeated itself amid the seemingly endless settling dust of central Taiwan. Both time and dust accumulated, gradually becoming the underlying tone of my life here and the texture of my work.
At the time, I viewed everything with a sense of distance. The world seemed to be covered by a hazy grey filter. The inescapable clutter of everyday life was transformed through my tired and unfocused vision onto paper, becoming horizontal landscapes held at a distance. This marked the beginning of my Mirage series, where these scenes took on the quality of atmospheric illusions, like mirages that could be seen from afar but never truly entered.
Later, I moved and travelled frequently across Taiwan, from north to south and west to east. Alongside a growing sense of instability came a more direct experience of the landscapes, climates, and everyday character of different places. Just as I began to feel that I was finally entering more deeply into this land, moments of unfamiliarity would surface again, returning me to a state in which everything felt both familiar and strange. I began to feel the same way when I returned to my hometown. The small town was changing. Elegant old houses were being demolished or rebuilt, while standardised buildings appeared one after another. Over time, I came to accept this blurred and uncertain boundary between being away and being at home. Living anywhere no longer feels entirely self evident to me. Perhaps uncertainty itself is the constant.
Once I stopped taking the places around me for granted, I began to wonder what changes they had undergone to arrive at their present form. How much time, how many people passing through, and how many changes large and small had accumulated before settling into what now seems stable enough to be called the character of a place?
The Diamond Sutra speaks of the world as a temporary gathering of countless particles of dust. Perhaps everything we experience is much the same. On a larger scale, everything is inevitably caught in a continuous process of change. Yet while everyday life moves forward through habit and numbness, certain small moments have the power to wake me from it. They may bring surprise, awe, rest, or a sudden sense of strangeness, but each feels unusually vivid.
A fantastic cloud lit by the evening sky, a construction project so immense that it evokes an unnameable fear, or a fleeting moment within a scene I have passed countless times. These things suddenly break through my dulled, distracted perception and feel closely connected to my own experience, while revealing something I had not noticed before. Within the emptiness born of unease and constant change, they offer me small moments of pleasure. At the same time, they seem to give me something more tangible to hold on to within this land.
What do the smallest fragments of life become once they have settled like dust? What might they allow us to see?
A halo forms when countless tiny ice crystals in cirrostratus clouds, thousands of metres above the ground, refract light into a ring across the sky. Perhaps the unnoticed fragments of everyday life work in a similar way. Through their refraction, I begin to glimpse the shape of the land around me, and to understand how I might find my own place within it.
