Past Exhibition

The calm wind shapes the boat derives its title from the retranslated first line of a prophecy offered to Susu when they visited a Matzu temple in Puli, the town where they were born, on their most recent trip to Taiwan. This immersive, digital artwork was made alongside multiple trips Susu took between Aotearoa and Taiwan over the past year in order to obtain exemption from compulsory military service. Dreamlike states of transeience between arrival and departure inform The calm wind shapes the boat, as it draws on desires for exploration, escape and new modes of belonging. Airports, streets, highways, trains and train stations are documented, and mark currents of movement through different locations. 

Materials and moments collected on each trip are threaded together as a composite of video, text, notes and animation – an attempted archive of a time of confusion and personal uncertainty. Using an early-2000s CCD camera – one that is around the same age as Susu and has been reclaimed by people born after then – poetically linked scenes are captured on film. Such as the pages from one of Susu’s childhood books, where its diagrammatic illustrations of diverse, interconnected worlds are made leigble through suspended seperation. Origami too, a practice taught to Susu at primary school, acts as a technique of reimagination. The pixelated aesthetic of the camera is inherently transformative as it is an out-dated form of technology, and adapted by Susu as a tool to bypass more current filters of image-making.

Transformation and translation occur across The calm wind shapes the boat. Images are folded and reshaped into different forms, views from windows change, seasons pass, text is communicated between multiple languages and animations gradually shift. Similarly, identity can become unstable, mutable and responsive. Susu’s navigation of different legal and cultural gender constructs traces how dislocation and redefinition can remake identity as something expansive. The act of note-writing and correspondence forms an element of The calm wind shapes the boat, as back-and-forth letters between Susu and poet Joanna Cho are published together. 

Throughout The calm wind shapes the boat present moments merge with past recollections – the digital realm acting as an intersection between different places, times, narratives and identities in a perpetual process of becoming. The first line lifted from Susu’s prophecy can be interpreted as signaling that the time is right to leave for another place, the moon and the calm ocean together offering ideal conditions to sail.