/ The Gesture of Being

Through the choices we make in action, we determine the traces of our existence.

A line walked for twenty years; a vase repaired over the course of twenty years; a legend embroidered in thread across 950 centimetres. When walking, mending, embroidery, and photography cease to be mere artistic techniques and become ways for artists to write in response to history, identity, and impermanence, each repeated act of labour embodies a profound reflection on—and conscious choice about—how life comes into being.

Against the backdrop of an era in which the production of text has become virtually costless and the creation of culture is increasingly reduced to the rearrangement of data, The Gesture of Being draws on Roland Barthes’s notion of the “gesture” as its curatorial axis: “What writing truly leaves behind may not be the finished text, but the resonance and traces that remain after the act has taken place.” From this point of departure, the exhibition asks how the art of writing might carry lived experience. Through the movement of the hand, the labour of the body, the transformation of materials, the residue of memory, and the sedimentation of place, it leaves behind trajectories that can be traced, examined dialectically, and understood.

The exhibition brings together significant works by five mid-career Asian artists—Shih Jin-Hua, Yeesookyung, Chang En-Man, Yeh Wei-Li, and Charwei Tsai—each presenting a distinct mode of writing rooted in personal experience and cultural background. Shih Jin-Hua writes of life’s expenditure through walking and physical labour. Yeesookyung joins fragments of broken ceramics with gold, transforming fractures into new narratives. Chang En-Man replaces brush and ink with the path of the needle, reclaiming the historical agency of Indigenous peoples. Through photography, literature, and place-based practice, Yeh Wei-Li reveals how memory is continually rewritten and layered. Charwei Tsai inscribes Buddhist scriptures onto fragile surfaces of sand and ice, contemplating impermanence between formation and dissolution.

Situated within the currents of history embodied by the ALIEN Art Centre, The Gesture of Being safeguards those lived processes that cannot be accelerated, readily replicated, or replaced. More than an exhibition about acts of writing, it reflects on how, amid continual change and disappearance, one may consciously shape an entire life into a profound form of existence.