2019  Highlight

“It was sunny, only a bit of mist suspended in the air so everything was very clear. Your late grandma and her friends together stood in front of me. She carried a watermelon in her arms. And then she took out a knife and sliced it into half. Suddenly a red light burst out. I woke up feeling very hearty.”

​

It was my mother’s dream. It is believed that when one’s late elderlies come to your dream they must come with a fortune for you. So after this dream, my mother firmly believed that she was going to make a fortune as the dream was so memorably vivid, which even encouraged her to analyze every single fragment of her dream, interpreting them into sounds, numbers, and so on. Back and force she worked on the dream for many days. Until the lottery draw a few days later, in which her numbers did not make her win, but the dream had taken her further, recalling her memories and longingness for her long-disappeared family. She kept telling her stories since then.

And I, on the other hand, dived into a different level of mind-wandering – Dreams reflect our desire and anxiety. The deficiency, uncertainty and anxiety in our reality turn our dreams into a means of fortunetelling. And as the gain of fortune, which decreases our anxiety of deficiency, can be the result of the deprivation of others, currency has indeed become a universal belief in this take-and-taken cycle.

At the same time, my mother continued describing vividly the rise and fall her blue-collar family had endured and the amount of wealth they could save during the 70s when “money-pack” was one foot tall in Taiwan.

My mother’s first half life feels like a dream to me, a dream not only reflecting people's deep desires, but also calling out the true affection within a household.

The exhibition “Whose Lucky Dream” is inspired by my mother’s dream, in which Chinese red pompom, ghost paper and counterfeit banknotes as the major elements, rearranged and reconstructed in the labor of origami art to create a sense of blessings and sacrifice. While living in the present society, we may have an occasional delusion of “Zhuangzi's Dream as a Butterfly” as we gradually become paralyzed by our excessive demand for money and materials constantly. Eventually, we all dance on the poisonous soil, humming in the faint mourning, chasing dreams in the dilapidated reality.