Mandela Memory

The work begins with the oral recollections of Cheng Tien-wen, who states that he and his elder brother witnessed the 1947 cigarette-confiscation incident in Taipei. His account, however, differs from existing historical records. Ciou interweaves this testimony with Huang Rong-can’s woodcut The Horrifying Inspection — The February 28 Incident in Taiwan. Through set construction and performance, personal memory, historical imagery, and fictional episodes become annotations to one another.

For the installation, Ciou constructs a mirrored arcade. The film’s images and subtitles appear horizontally reversed and can only be read in their correct orientation through the mirror. The arcade structure divides the images, while viewers’ own reflections enter the scene, drawing them into the re-presentation of memory. The work transforms discrepancies between memory and historical records into questions of narrative and space, asking how individuals understand and recount history. In 2024, it received the Grand Prize of the Taipei Art Awards.