CIOU
ZIH-YAN

Reconstructing Personal Memory and History

Ciou Zih-Yan’s practice continually asks how individuals form relationships with histories they have not experienced firsthand. Born two years before the lifting of martial law and raised in a Hakka family in Miaoli, his understanding of martial law and the White Terror comes from family memories, local experience, and the images and historical records he encountered later. The gap between what he knows and what he feels is a starting point for his work. The ways in which Taiwan New Cinema allows everyday life to carry history have also been an important reference in the development of his moving-image narratives.

Through fieldwork, oral interviews, and archival research, he looks to local details for traces of history within individual lives. He then uses reworking, performance, and fiction to construct imagined settings through which the past can be approached anew. ‘Filling in the blanks’ has become an ongoing method: giving unspoken experiences, discrepancies between accounts, and gaps in memory a space in which they can be seen and discussed. Different versions of a story coexist in his works, preserving the differences in how individuals understand history.

Set construction and filming together shape his narratives. Cardboard, timber structures, and fabricated objects retain the traces of their making; the backs of sets and their supporting structures also remain visible. These recognisable processes extend the act of viewing to how images are made and spaces organised. Through their bodily positions, movements, and shifts in perspective, viewers move between screens, objects, and exhibition spaces, experiencing the ways in which history is told.

As his practice has expanded from family and local memories to military remains, colonial-era studies of nature, and questions of identity, the scope of his historical inquiry has grown. Running through this work is a concern with how images, language, and objects shape historical understanding, and how individuals find their own place within established narratives. Moving images and installations turn these questions into experiences that can be felt, inviting viewers to bring their own memories to the process of understanding.