A solo exhibition, "East Island and the North Sea" by Hsieh Jung-Wei, continues his exploration of the previous series, East Moonlight, which chased the moonlight to the end of the world. The distance between the earth and the moon is 384,400 kilometres, and if moonlight were to represent time, the time from moon reflecting sunlight to it being seen by us represents a duration of 1.28 seconds, calculated at the speed of light speed of 299,792.458 kilometres per second.
Perhaps, the so-called instant is also the past. We don't feel the difference of a billionth of a second, and similarly, we don't notice that moonlight is 1.28 seconds in the past. The Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume used the beauty of the moonlight as a metaphor for the sincerity and tactfulness of emotion. Perhaps, this is the factual description of its fleeting state.
The ballpoint pen works on paper are like intersections between space and time. Time is flattened and compressed on a surface through intense-labour, regularity, and repetitive layers. While the sense of direction to the east and the north is essential, however, the ruler's scale flattens the earth, offers a novel interpretation, and unintentionally creates a new kind of world.
