The Detour of Alterity: "Dear" and a Translation of the Other

Text / Lee Jing-Hua

Within the Zone, the straight path is never the shortest one. The more circuitous the route, the lower the risk. No one can explain why; they simply know that the seemingly unnecessary detour is the only passable way forward. This is the warning the guide repeats throughout Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.

Curator Huang Chien-Hua places this exchange at the opening of Dear Alterity, an exhibition at Moolah Multi-Art Space. It serves as the exhibition’s fuse, and almost as an expression of his way of approaching art: some things cannot be apprehended directly. They can only be approached obliquely, circled repeatedly from the side, until their contours gradually begin to emerge.

Huang brings this idea into the exhibition in the hope that visitors will resist the impulse to decide, upon first entering the gallery, whether a work is immediately intelligible or worthy of lingering over. In an age of information overload, people have grown accustomed to judging within seconds whether something deserves our time. Yet this premise also poses a challenge for critique. If the curator himself argues against arriving in a straight line, how might a review speak of the exhibition without falling back into precisely the kind of hurried, explanatory mode of viewing that it refuses?

And so this essay, too, takes the detour. Rather than introducing the four participating artists—Lu Ming-Te, Hsiao Chu-Fang, Chan Shih-Tai, and Chuang Ho—one by one from the outset, it first circles around the exhibition’s central keyword: alterity.

What makes this exhibition genuinely compelling lies not only in the individual character of its four bodies of work, but also in the way the curator relocates, translates, and—subtly, perhaps even inadvertently—shifts the meaning of the word alterity, while placing before it the unexpected address, “Dear.” We first need to understand what this word encountered along its journey before returning to the gallery to see what the curator has ultimately done.

Within the Western theoretical tradition, alterity is a term that carries considerable weight. It names that which cannot be reduced or absorbed into existing order: an otherness that lies beyond the self, resisting both comprehension and assimilation.

Yet this is not the kind of otherness toward which the exhibition points. Its first detour consists in quietly shifting alterity away from “the other outside the self” and back toward what we assume to be familiar. In Huang’s formulation, alterity no longer arrives as absolute unfamiliarity confronting us head-on. Instead, it appears as something more like an unsettling familiarity: an image we are convinced we understand, until, by lingering a little longer, an unexpected distance gradually begins to seep through. This is not the shock of surprise; it is closer to a symptom, one that reminds us that habitual ways of understanding are always bounded by their own limits.

How, then, can a curatorial strategy that insists on maintaining distance still invite the viewer in? The answer lies in the single word placed before “Alterity”: “Dear.” It is the salutation that opens a letter or a diary entry, an address reserved for the one held close to our heart, carrying a tenderness that is almost entirely unguarded. Placed before a theoretical term predicated on distance, it initially feels dissonant; yet it is also the exhibition’s most gentle and most decisive move.

This is not an attempt to domesticate alterity into something endearing. Quite the contrary, “Dear” acknowledges that it can never be fully known, and yet chooses to draw near nonetheless. It does not dissolve distance; it learns to coexist with it. This is a posture that knows how to linger, allows for detour, and openly acknowledges the limits of habitual understanding: one that does not rush to place what lies before us into existing categories, nor hurry to assign it a stable, clear, and repeatedly identifiable position, but instead allows ambiguity to remain and hesitation to become part of understanding.

Dear Alterity, then, is no longer concerned solely with an external other. Rather, it turns what might otherwise remain at a remove, marked by heterogeneity and a resistance to classification, into a state that can be approached, held in the gaze, and brought back into relation. The question the exhibition essentially poses is this: when something cannot be directly seized, are we still willing to circle around it, and to linger there, gently, a little longer? 

On the first floor, Lu Ming-Te’s canvases are covered in imagery rendered in the manner of field guides: plants drawn with illustrative precision, interspersed with collaged fragments, transfer prints, and scattered text. Behind these zoological and botanical illustrations, the specimen-based visual vocabulary, and the transferred imagery lies an entire system of classification drawn from library science and museology. He has said that all nature is artificial nature. Thus, the images appear legible, yet they continuously release multiple, shifting referents, preventing reading from coming to a halt and making it impossible to determine at first glance whether what one sees is an indigenous organism, a technological artifact, or the residue of a social system. Viewing is slowed here, drawn onward, gradually becoming a kind of migration across image, memory, and the structures of knowledge.

Entering the second floor, the work of Hsiao Chu-Fang turns emotion into a kind of climate. The figures in her paintings have no fixed gender and no clearly defined facial features; they read like the silhouette of someone alone with themselves, rendered with an almost graffiti-like hand, capturing those slightly awkward moments of everyday life. The contours of the figures are first taped out to define the complete form, and the tape is removed once the painting is done; the ground color is worked over repeatedly with a power sander, rubbed into the canvas until it hovers between presence and absence. On the wall hangs a painting of a deep bowl—the very bowl she ate from as a child—and the steam rising from its rim is painted to resemble her own family.

In the corner, Chuang Ho’s work occupies a space somewhere between animation and video. He relies neither on photographic recording nor rotoscoping, but draws each frame by hand, from memory, imagination, and bodily sensation. He has said that in making his work, he counts frames rather then duration, because what concerns him is how the disappearance and emergence of each individual image are carried forward into motion within the viewer’s consciousness. The image is not a stable object, but an event repeatedly summoned between appearing, transforming, lingering, and vanishing. When the developing of the image itself becomes the process, we find that some things do not come into being only after they are seen; rather, in the space between incomplete emergence and delayed disappearance, they gradually form a connection with the viewer, little by little.

Ascending to the third floor, the entire corridor is given over to a single work by Chan Shih-Tai. Bathed in a soft amber glow and hung at a slight angle, not quite level with the eye, it creates an indefinable sense of tilt the moment one enters the space. Chan works with offcuts discarded by others; the weathered surfaces of the stone, its fractured edges, and the traces of mechanical cutting are all left intact. Even the pencil guidelines drawn during the carving process, marks that would ordinarily be polished away at the end, remain preserved exactly as they were.

There is an elegant proposition embedded in the tradition of stone carving: the image already lies latent within the stone, and carving is merely the removal of what is superfluous, allowing the sculpture to surface. Carving, in this sense, is understood as subtraction. But Chan Shih-Tai does not work this way. The lines he preserves are not preliminary sketches awaiting erasure; they are deliberately kept markers, indicating that the form was once measured and approached, yet never fully driven toward completion. The sculpture therefore ceases to be the result of a single, conclusive act of shaping, and instead remains an open process: emergence, it turns out, does not necessarily come from deliberate form-giving.

Placed together, the work of all four artists allows a shared structure to emerge. In each case, alterity does not arise from an external other confronting us head-on, demanding opposition; rather, it is generated in the gap between the experience of viewing and the structure of the material itself. Familiar images, familiar media, and familiar techniques all undergo subtle shifts through their own respective detours, revealing aspects that have yet to be fully articulated. The pencil lines Chan Shih-Tai leaves behind keep a piece of stone perpetually suspended before completion; just as we think we have grasped the form, his sculpture leaves us with both the act of measurement and his hesitation. Chuang Ho’s frame-by-frame animation repeatedly summons the image between appearance and disappearance; what seems to be continuous motion is, in each individual frame, a reminder that movement is something consciousness itself supplies. None of these fissures are imposed by external force, yet each quietly loosens the habits of familiar seeing by a single frame. Those edges have not stayed in place; they have simply changed temperature, and continue to exist.

To return to the detour the curator borrows from Tarkovsky: the guide’s words are vague, and the roundabout way is not truly safer, only untraveled. This exhibition is that kind of path. It offers no guarantee that taking the long way around will lead to understanding; it only confirms that passing straight through will bring nothing into view. And emergence is always slow. Some things do not come into being only after they are seen; rather, in the interval between unfinished emergence and delayed disappearance, they gradually form a connection with those willing to linger a while longer. Lu Ming-Te’s images, Hsiao Chu-Fang’s deviations, Chan Shih-Tai’s pencil lines, and Chuang Ho’s frame-by-frame sequences do not rush toward arrival, nor do they rush to be named. The works simply remain where they are, waiting for a slower way of seeing.

Dear Alterity may, in the end, resolve itself into a simple greeting: one addressed to all that we have yet to learn to read, and equally to ourselves—this generation always in such haste to understand. It does not erase the distance between us and the world; it only tries, within the distance of the detour, to teach us once again how to encounter the work before us.

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