As the Crow Flies

"As the Crow Flies" is my exploration of home, memory, and distance as a female migrant. Through photography, textiles, sculpture, and sound, I trace fragile connections between places and the traces of life lived between worlds.

As the Crow Flies is a series about migration, time, memory, home, and layered identities. It reflects my reality of living in Norway for seven years while intermittently returning to Taiwan. Using photography, textiles, painting, sculpture, language, and sound, the work traces the experience of moving between places: a dream-like state where memories are constantly awakened, shifting between familiarity and estrangement. It speaks to how belonging can be both deeply rooted and endlessly unsettled, always caught between presence and distance.

The project began in 2023 with quick images taken during brief visits to seven places I call “home.” These images became an entry point into how time and space are perceived differently when living between geographies, and how moments that feel ordinary can quickly turn into fragile markers of change. All works were completed in 2025, compressing years of lived experience into form, documenting a movement from presence to absence, and the slow fading and transformation of memory. At its core, the series reflects on what “home” can mean, and how roles within family and migration continue to shift over time.

Materiality is central to the work. I developed a hybrid process: scanning analog film, digitally printing on paper, layering acrylic medium, then carefully removing the paper to leave only ink and dried acrylic. This time-intensive method gives the surface a translucent, skin-like quality, transforming images into tactile, vulnerable remnants. Sculptural elements draw from plexiglass strips, metal fittings, and soft fabric-like gestures, creating a tension between the industrial and domestic, the cold and the warm, the rigid and the intimate.

The series unfolds in four chapters: 2023.02–2024.02–2024.06, Family Album, 8800 km, 14 Postcards (Until the Day She Arrives), and The Weight that Holds (from Afar).

2023.02–2024.02–2024.06 is the starting point of the series. It features around 200 postcard-sized photo-sculptures in various forms. By presenting scenes that once belonged to everyday life as postcards—an object light enough to carry for a “visitor” like me—it develops a language that feels both familiar and strange. These fragments flicker like camera flashes: brief, sharp, and uncertain.

Family Album takes the form of a large hanging installation built with industrial freezer curtain structures, centering on four dressing/ working tables: mine, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my great-grandmother’s. 8800 km, 14 Postcards (Until the Day She Arrives) is based on exchanges with my mother, combining photographs of Norwegian daily scenes with imagined landscapes seen through her eyes, as someone who has never been there.

The Weight that Holds (from Afar), the most recent chapter, is presented as a spatial installation composed of curtain-like photo-textile pieces, a two-channel soundscape, and a single video. The works capture traces of dust, the afternoon light through curtains, and collaged fabrics, becoming a gesture of longing and grief for a household I could not return to. Each piece has fragments of Norwegian residence documents stitched along the edges, reflecting migration as a condition of being at home in two places, yet never fully in either.