Awake Before Your Gaze

Awake Before Your Gaze centers on two Afro-Taiwanese descendants of U.S. soldiers stationed in Taiwan. Their mixed-race appearance is often misrecognized by society and even within their own families, while language remains their only connection to Taiwan. One speaks Hakka and the other Taiwanese. Like the unrecognized parts of their ancestry, these languages exist as isolated islands. They do not speak English and feel distant from African American culture. Their appearance carries colonial projections unrelated to their own lives, yet they remain unable to escape their shadow.
 

Presented as a two-channel video installation, the work unfolds through hypnosis sessions. The two protagonists speak about their fragmented experiences of learning language, the misrecognitions and assumptions imposed upon them because of their appearance, and their emotional connections to family and place. Their faces, voices, and expressions reveal the historical traces left behind by the U.S. military presence in postwar Taiwan, and how this history continues to shape contemporary life.