Sandwich Biscuit FG

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

What I do to these images is what the world does to me: infiltration, erasure, reorganisation, renaming, flattening, done repeatedly. Sandwich Biscuit FG makes this structural violence visible by turning the photographic process itself into a critical method. Each act of collecting, encoding, reconstructing, and reprinting mirrors the pressures of cultural infiltration and immigrant identity that shape my experience as a Taiwanese artist living in London.

Growing up in Taiwan during the peak influx of Japanese otaku culture, I internalised anime, comics, and games more deeply than any indigenous cultural form. This was not incidental. It was the continuation of a longer pattern. Taiwan's colonial history under Japan left cultural channels open long after formal occupation ended, and Japanese popular culture flowed through them with an intimacy that made it feel native. In this project, I use First Gundam, a franchise whose themes of war, colonialism, and constructed humanity echo Taiwan's own history, as a symbol of that cultural infiltration.

Over several years, I obsessively collected First Gundam images from the streets of Taipei, Bangkok, and London: shop displays, magazine scans, instruction manuals, public installations. I printed them all, deliberately erasing their original digital information, and handwrote my own coding system onto each one: Topic, Location, Year, Date, Time, Sequence. This consolidated their diversity into a single, uniform format. I removed their colours, trimmed their individuality, granted them legibility on my terms. I then scanned them back and fed them into photogrammetry, a technology originally developed for military intelligence and cartographic surveying, which dismantles, matches, and reconstructs the images into 3D models. I photographed and reprinted the results, then iterated the entire cycle again. And again.

Through this recursive process, meaning is continuously stripped and granted anew. The original symbolism of First Gundam dissolves; what remains is a residue shaped entirely by my interventions — and by the technology's own logic. Photogrammetry, with its history of aerial reconnaissance and territorial mapping, is not a neutral tool. I treat it as a technical metaphor for the colonised experience: a meticulous invasion disguised as restoring reality. The handwritten codes I inscribe on the reconstructed models function as acknowledgements of what each fragment once was, yet they follow my format, not the originals'. This is how power operates: it permits diversity, as long as it is expressed in forms the system can comprehend.

Yet throughout this process, cracks and distortions persist. Textures fragment; forms refuse to stabilise; the reconstructed models carry visible evidence of resistance. These imperfections are not staged. They emerge naturally from the iterative cycle and are preserved as proof that even under sustained pressure, something remains untamed. Sandwich Biscuit FG is my process of dissolving symbols, and a record of being dissolved.