Shadow Puppet

2026. Single Channel Video & Sound

Shadow Puppet is a single-channel video work that revisits childhood memories through fragmentation and reconstruction. Filmed in Beitou, across sites such as the outskirts of Taipei Children’s Amusement Park, the National Taiwan Science Education Center, Guandu Nature Park, and the streets near my former elementary school, the work traces locations that once defined my relationship with my father; these are spaces he used to drive me to.

The footage follows my father, played by himself, from a distance. The camera followed in a manner that feels observational yet unsettled, in a way closer to searching than documenting. Shot digitally in black and white with a red filter, this method creates a heightened contrast that pushes the scenes into a liminal, almost dreamlike state.

The video is processed using PixelCrash v1.1 (created by @van_der_ex), which reconstructs the image through data rather than pixels. Two visual layers divide the frame. The darker regions collapse into dense, unreadable mass under the label “SHADOW,” while the midtones are rearticulated through the repeated symbol “PUPPET.”

Moments of lag interrupt the video. These pauses parallel the way I see memory functions like: not continuously, but haltingly, looping, and always incompletely. The accompanying sound work consists of layered, delayed, and echoed recordings taken by my father during our past outings.

The title Shadow Puppet originates from my childhood ritual. Before sleep, my father would form a dog shadow with his hands against the wall—"影子狗," a simple shadow figure that existed somewhere within my childhood imagination. This figure implicitly lingers in the work as a structure: something projected, constructed, and dependent on light.

Shadow Puppet is not an attempt to reconstruct memory faithfully; what remains is a projection shaped as much by absence as by what is remembered.