The Year | yuhsinwu

The Year, 2023

Dimensions: 8.5x11x3", 365 pages

Medium: book of paper cuttings

The Year is a durational artist book comprising 365 cut-out pages, each marking a day in the turbulent landscape of 2020—a year shaped by global rupture, enforced stillness, and collective introspection. Through a meticulous process of gridded incisions, I fragment cities into abstracted cartographies: aerial perspectives, dissected geographies, and ghostly urban topographies. Each page becomes a site of perforation and passage—an aperture that invites the viewer to pierce through, navigate across, and bear witness to the spatial and psychological terrains of a year defined by isolation and dislocation.

This work enacts a sustained investigation into the notion of boundaries—not as fixed limits, but as permeable zones of possibility. Boundaries, once mechanisms of containment and division, are here reimagined as sites of activation. They have historically served as enclosures, both physical and ideological, reinforcing a reluctance to move or to adopt new perspectives. In The Year, the periphery transforms into a center. Each act of turning a page becomes a gesture of inquiry, a tactile confrontation with the architectures that delimit our perception.

By reconfiguring boundaries as mobile and contingent, the work embodies a methodology of boundary thinking—a practice that reveals how our positionalities construct our cognitive maps, and how these maps can be dismantled, reoriented, and reimagined. The perforated pages invite the viewer into a multilayered dimension—activated through the visual and physical acts of looking through and moving across—where voices and perspectives once on the periphery become stimuli for overturning our thinking structures.

《The Year》是一本歷時性的藝術書籍，由365頁鏤空頁面組成，每一頁象徵動盪不安的 2020 年中的一天——那是一段被全球性的崩解、被迫的靜止與集體內省所形塑的時期。透過一套精密的格狀切割技法，我將城市解構為抽象化的地理圖像：俯瞰的視角、被剖析的地景、幽靈般的都市地形。每一頁皆成為穿透與通行的場域——一道開口，邀請觀者穿越、移動，並見證這段由隔離與位移所定義的空間與心理地景。

這件作品持續探問「邊界」的概念——不是將其視為既定的界線，而是作為流動且具有潛能的可能空間。邊界，曾是封閉與劃分的機制，在此被重新想像為能量的觸發點。歷史上，邊界作為物理與意識形態上的圍牆，往往強化了人們不願移動或轉換觀點的慣性。在《The Year》中，邊緣不再只是外圍，而是轉化為中心。每一次翻頁的動作，都是一種探問的姿態，一次對限制我們感知結構的觸覺對峙。

藉由將邊界視為可移動與依情境而定的狀態，這件作品實踐了一種「邊界思維」的方法論——這是一種揭示我們的位置如何形塑我們的認知地圖的實踐，也是一種讓這些地圖得以被拆解、重新定位與重構的可能。那些鏤空的紙頁，透過視覺與身體的穿越與移動行為，邀請觀者進入一個多層次的維度——在這裡，那些曾被置於邊緣的聲音與觀點，成為翻轉我們思維結構的觸發器。