Occupy Sinocentrism
This work contrasts Taiwan’s everyday reality with its inherited cultural symbolism. A motorcyclist repeatedly circles the National Palace Museum without ever entering—serving as a metaphor for how Taiwanese people, while indoctrinated to see themselves as the inheritors of Chinese culture, remain at a distance, revering an imagined cultural center they cannot access or have never connected to. The action is documented and projected onto traditional Chinese rice paper, accompanied by an installation of scattered branches that casts Shan-Shui-inspired shadows across the scroll. This layering bridges national iconography with lived experience, questioning the dissonance between ideological heritage and contemporary identity.
Taiwanese people have long been educated by the Nationalist government to revere the National Palace Museum as a symbol of national identity. The museum’s vast collection of antiques and treasures is used to assert Taiwan’s status as the legitimate inheritor of Chinese culture following the 1947 Chinese Civil War. Yet, the narratives and aesthetics curated within the museum are often disconnected from the realities of Taiwanese daily life.
In this work, Tzu Tung invited a motorcyclist—representing the most common form of transport in Taiwan—to ride repeatedly around the National Palace Museum for an entire day. The motorcyclist endlessly circles its perimeter but is never allowed to enter, echoing the symbolic condition of Taiwanese people: bound to the ideology of inherited Chinese culture, yet perpetually excluded from its core. The recorded image of this act is then projected onto traditional Chinese rice paper, transforming the museum's rigid iconography into a layered reflection on mobility, exclusion, and national identity. By merging projection, movement, and scroll format, the work challenges who gets to access, possess, and define culture in a postcolonial context.