Since 2017, I have been developing the Family Drama series, which investigates how historical and national narratives take shape and circulate through the family—often considered the basic unit of society—in the post-Cold War era. 910 HIGHVIEW is the final project in this series. By engaging with the interior and exterior spaces, as well as the traces of domestic life at the eponymous 910 Highview residence, the project unpacks the varying cognitive narratives among family members. These narratives are structured into sequential chapters and presented through a combination of video and object installations. This creative research project will revolve around these installations, conducting chapter-by-chapter experiments with spatial, visual, and acoustic arrangements besides visitor flow. Moreover, a series of public talks will retrospectively examine the Family Drama series to calibrate the positioning of this final chapter.

My husband, John, grew up in his family home at 910 Highview in Georgia, USA. If my own family was shaped by the White Terror in Taiwan, John’s family was forged alongside the development of the post-war American aviation industry. Both the White Terror and the US aviation boom manifest the divergent regional impacts of the Cold War. After John and I married, I began to sense the underlying tension arising from our differing interpretations of historical contexts. We each inherited a “virtual legacy” from previous generations’ wartime experiences, underpinned by the affective identification we respectively acquired from our own families and societies. The project 910 HIGHVIEW seeks to articulate these ingrained cognitive patterns, which have accumulated through generational affective experiences to the point where their origins are obscured. By observing these subtle, lingering traces, can we arrive at an understanding that looks unfamiliar even to ourselves, thereby opening up the possibility for a positional shift? Or, by recognizing the limits of our own conceptual mobility, can we develop new strategies for coexisting with the “Other”?

HUANG Li-Hui’s Portfolio Website