Munus Shih

(4066.62, 62)

Installation, 2024

4066.62, 62, began last year in Guanxi, Taiwan, was done in collaboration with local Taiwanese artists and researchers. We were invited to create a cultural memory monument for my hometown back in Guansi, Taiwan. We uncovered the story of Hakka soldiers who were forced to join the military during WWII who were conscripted in the Japanese military, later captured by the Soviet Union. After the war, they returned home to a politically transformed Taiwan, struggling with questions of identy and belonging.

To honor these histories, we built a parametric design system that marks each migration with a deformed house, and ask how does the shape of the home gradually change through each departure?

We invited participants to interact with our website to document their journey of leaving and coming home by inputting these data and sharing their personal stories. Each data point will then be fed into the parametric system and added to a collection of uniquely generated deformed houses on the website. These data will also be uploaded to the cloud as morse code and captured by the physical installation in Guanxi, presented in continuously flashing telegraphic signals.

Collaborators

Yalan Wen

I hao Liao

Recognitions

  • Archived at Taiwanese Hakka Affairs Council

People can go to the website to read other people’s stories of migration and coming home.

4066.62 marks the geographical distance between soldier Lai Xingyang and his hometown of Guanxi when he was sent to the labor camp in Siberia.

We developed a generative system using code to create a unique house for each data point.