8800 km, 14 Postcards (Until the Day She Arrives)

Joanna Chia-yu Lin

joannachiayulin@gmail.com
Instagram

CV / ABOUT

NEWS

20258800 km, 14 Postcards (Until the Day She Arrives)

8800 km, 14 Postcards
(Until the Day She Arrives)

2025

Acrylic medium, inkjet print pigment, magnets, steel pipes and hand-bent engraved plexiglass.

14 sets, various sizes, the majority of the works individually measure approx. 10.5 x 15 - 40 x 21 cm.

The work is part of series As the Crow Flies (2025-) and is adaptable to different contexts with varied selections from the series.

As the Crow Flies, an interdisciplinary exploration of memory and shifting identities between places. The title, taken from the phrase "as the crow flies" (referring to the most direct path), reflects the emotional and temporal distances that influence the notion of home.

In the seven years I have lived in Norway, my mother has never visited. We each carry imagined versions of the other's life, fragments built from distance, absence, and memory. So, I proposed we exchange postcards. Each one carries a landscape, a person, or a dish, written from where I am, received from where she is.

These postcards begin with photographs taken on film, fragments of my everyday. I print them digitally on paper, layer paint over the surface, then remove the paper fibres. What remains are dried pigments, transferred ink, and traces of what was washed away and what insisted on staying. These layered images hold the textures of my daily life in Norway, perhaps ones she has never seen.

The exchange began in the spring of 2024, as the snow began to melt. The photographs span the past three years and will continue, until the day she arrives.

There is physical distance. There is temporal distance. There is imagination. And there is longing.

This work was exhibited at Yáo Alternative Space, Taichung, Taiwan, as part of the group exhibition Candlelight, Postcards, and the West Coast, together with Sung-wan Huang and Ting-Wen Chiang, in 2025.

This exhibition is supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and Taichung City Government Cultural Affairs Bureau.

Visual Design by Ting-Wen Chiang.

Documentation of other parts of the exhibition

JCYL-180-192/25