You go this way 你走這條

Urban development and expansion have always unfolded along roads, and Taoyuan has largely followed the same pattern. “You take this road”—an utterly ordinary phrase, the kind of answer one might receive when asking for directions. In just four words, it forms a miniature story of everyday urban life: newcomers continue to arrive, while longtime residents point the way, connecting them to older territories, routes, and layers of experience.

In Railway Landscape Memory: High-Speed Rail Scenery, Chen Fei-hao records the shifting views outside the windows of two high-speed rail journeys, from Taipei to Taoyuan and from Taoyuan to Taichung. Using the thirty-six frames of a roll of 35mm film, he photographs the landscapes along the route, then selects, distorts, and recomposes the images into flowing lines. The work translates into visual form the strange and entirely new perception of time produced by a new mode of transportation.

Margot Guillemot’s Passing Through was created when she was first invited to exhibit in Taoyuan, beginning with an online “visit” to the city. Using Google Street View, she virtually wandered through the area surrounding the exhibition venue through the camera of the Street View car. She captured fragments of these views and rearranged them into dispersed, comic-like panels. There is neither continuity nor narrative between the individual frames; instead, the work records the particular bodily sensation of a wanderer in an unfamiliar city—the restless act of looking here and there, taking everything in.

While Chen Fei-hao and Margot Guillemot use their works to measure unfamiliar spaces and landscapes, Hung Yu-Hao and Yu-tin Lin turn their attention toward cities they already know well. Hung takes the aging streets of Wanhua, where he has lived for many years, as his subject. In On Fluid Street II, drone footage follows the activities of people along a street from morning to night. The aerial perspective flattens the landscape, making an otherwise familiar street appear distant and strange. Wanderland-1 and Wanderland-3, meanwhile, use 3D scanning to document everyday scenes beneath Wanhua’s arcades. Their flickering point-cloud forms resemble fragments arriving from different moments in time, layering historical textures and lived memories within the image.

Lin Yu-ting’s Ideal House 3: Suddenly, the Peach Blossom Spring takes Taiwanese real-estate billboards from the 1980s as its material while also drawing from contemporary advertising signs found in Taoyuan. Through landscape painting and the visual language of these older billboards, Lin reinterprets sites once imagined as future housing developments. Looking back at the idyllic promise of homes surrounded by blue skies and green fields, and then toward today’s densely built city, where high-rises leave little room to breathe, Lin strips the advertisement back to an open field and a blue sky—offering her own answer to what a good life might look like.

The four artists stand at very different physical distances from the places they depict: some may never have visited them, while others have lived there for years. Yet each attempts to establish an appropriate temporal, spatial, or psychological distance from the city—a distance that allows a sense of adventure and freshness to remain. From there, they extend their feelers outward to measure and explore the urban environment. At the same time, they become guides themselves, pointing toward possible routes through which the landscapes along the way might be encountered anew.