Déjà Vu

作品賞析

The artist, Lin Shao-Jie, began working on Déjà Vu when contemplating the history of Taiwan’s colonialization and how it still exists in daily life, affecting our self-identity. This work used Google Maps Street View to collect views of all the existing “Zhongzheng Roads” found in 368 villages, towns, cities, and districts in Taiwan. The 181 Zhongzheng Roads were then divided by administrative regions, and the six digital prints here are arranged in order of their postal codes. This familiar road name actually carries with it the heavy history of Taiwan’s past authoritarianism. The artist repeatedly overlapped the images of the various Zhongzheng Roads to provide a super-real viewing perspective. The work uses a different vocabulary to describe the processes of “decolonization” and “recolonization” experienced by Taiwan after World War II. It also guides us in pondering about how this past history affected the past and continues to affect the present, and how people’s identities are being deconstructed and reconstructed.