Sandwich Biscuit FG

What I do to these images is what the world does to me. Through collecting, inscribing, and iteratively reconstructing First Gundam images via photogrammetry, I trace how cultural infiltration dismantles and rewrites identity.

Taipei, London, Bangkok: three cities I return to, each shaped by distinct cultural currents, each home to street-level traces of Japanese popular culture that arrived through different historical channels. In Bangkok, Gundam merchandise inhabits night markets alongside Thai pop culture. In Taipei, it saturates the commercial landscape as residue of Japanese colonial influence and decades of otaku cultural infiltration. In London, it appears in specialty shops as imported curiosity. These are cultural islands, separate yet connected by the circulation of the same symbols across radically different contexts.

FG, the first completed sub-series of my ongoing project Sandwich Biscuit, investigates what happens when these islands are forced into a single frame. I collect street photographs of Gundam merchandise across all three cities, print them in black and white, and handwrite inscriptions onto each print recording subject, location, date, and sequence. The inscribed prints are scanned and processed through photogrammetry, a technology rooted in military surveying that evaluates photographs against algorithmic standards of coherence, eliminates those that do not conform, and merges the remainder into a unified three-dimensional reconstruction. I re-photograph the model and reprint it, and the cycle continues.

The result is an enforced archipelago: three distinct cultural geographies compressed into one model, their differences flattened by the same algorithmic logic. The photocopy step performs an invisible, structural intervention, formatting each image into a standardised register. The handwritten inscriptions perform a visible, personal one, overwriting the image with my own system of classification. Together, these mirror how identity is reshaped when moving between cultural islands: systemic forces that operate beneath notice, and explicit acts of naming that announce themselves.

The series comprises works at different stages of this iterative cycle. Early iterations preserve partial legibility, the source imagery still recognisable beneath accumulating distortion. Later works approach abstraction, the original dissolved into texture and fragment. Three exist as photogravure prints. The work also includes a texture atlas generated by the photogrammetry software, exposing the computational logic that governs the reconstruction.

What I do to these images mirrors what external systems do to me. Growing up in Taiwan, I absorbed Japanese anime, manga, and games more deeply than any local cultural form. After relocating to London, this already-hybridised identity was further compressed by Western frameworks unable to accommodate its layers. Each crossing between islands demands a new translation, and each translation is an act of power that strips away what it claims to preserve. Yet something persists. The images survive their own dissolution, returning in forms that carry the residue of every previous state.