Medicine 心藥

AI has no body. It cannot experience any sensibility beyond language and text — no bodily sense, no sense of gender, no belief or faith. But if AI can turn an abstract lived experience, existing only in the mind, into an image, and that image is printed as a physical tarot card, then through actual touch and conversation with the person who comes for a reading, might we not arrive at some shared understanding of that experience — and from that shared understanding, find a possibility for the future?

I didn't want to turn the cards into slogans or standard answers. They are closer to a set of scenes you can re-enter again and again: a UFO descending slowly over a sea of milk tea; people scaling a cliff edge to sit an exam worth 100 points; 2330 (TSMC) and the Central Mountain Range, both cast as the mountain-god that guards the nation. Each image lets the viewer project their own story onto it, and within that I practice two things: first, turning a private feeling into a bridge that can be shared; second, letting that sharing stop short of becoming a command. Rather than define "what the standard is," I'd rather first make clear "what I saw."

A mask is both disguise and truth: online, it's the polished persona we perform; at night, it's a soundproof second skin — only when no one recognizes me can I be myself. Once the mask becomes the face, I asked myself: strip away the labels of grades, friends, school, lover — what's still left breathing?

The origin of this deck is inevitably steeped in the atmosphere of the pandemic year 2022 — wearing a mask was already like wearing a mask. In my senior year of high school, a Level 3 alert kept classes online and me at home, drifting alone through a sea of study for the GSAT, my only contact with classmates reduced to the cold text of a messaging app. A friend's reply, instant or delayed, read or unread, a period or a tilde, a smiling face or a sobbing one — I could never read these with full confidence, always afraid of getting it wrong, afraid the other person had come to dislike me.

After AI arrived, I found this same linguistic anxiety turned into something I actually enjoyed — chatting with AI felt like a wishing well or a gachapon machine that would never abandon its user: not entirely controllable, but always good for something interesting.

Long ago, in the peaceful years before AI was born, we had already been trained to be predictors, reading the intentions of those above us: writing whatever the teacher implied in class, cleaning up after a boss who only ever spoke in vague hints and expected us to handle the rest. I learned to be compliant, to be a good, obedient “YES MAN”.

This muscle memory carried over into work and social life: "guessing" became a language, "unspoken group consensus" became a constitution, and standing out was never allowed — that's what got you called a freak. When AI arrived, humans simply found a new object to exploit for the same things: surprise, automation, immediacy. What do you want? Doesn't matter, just give me something. Often I feel I'm not really using a tool so much as looking for an excuse — afraid of failing, so I lean on the perfect blueprint AI draws for me.

And yet AI has no body. It cannot experience any sensibility beyond language and text — no bodily sense, no sense of gender, no belief or faith; its perception, thought, and consciousness are all derived from databases and data scraped from the internet. So AI cannot understand a beauty that words can only gesture toward, or any experience of the transcendent that lies beyond language.

But if AI can turn an abstract lived experience, existing only in the mind, into an image, and that image is printed as a physical tarot card, then through actual touch and conversation with the person who comes for a reading, might we not arrive at some shared understanding of that experience — and from that shared understanding, find a possibility for the future? I, the audience, and AI together conjure an imagination of the future — born from the future.

I didn't want to turn the cards into slogans or standard answers. They are closer to a set of scenes you can re-enter again and again: a UFO descending slowly over a sea of milk tea; people scaling a cliff edge to sit an exam worth 100 points; 2330 (TSMC) and the Central Mountain Range, both cast as the mountain-god that guards the nation. Each image lets the viewer project their own story onto it, and within that I practice two things: first, turning a private feeling into a bridge that can be shared; second, letting that sharing stop short of becoming a command. Rather than define "what the standard is," I'd rather first make clear "what I saw."

All the way through photographing and performing, my work has always taken personal, lived experience and used it to reflect back a shared experience of contemporary society. Preparing for this solo show, I realized this thread has actually been led all along by a deck of cards — the tarot has only 78 cards, yet it can fold the scenes that recur throughout human life, across time and place, into simple symbols: parting, longing, choice, silence, happiness, nostalgia.

The tarot is like a portable mythological system, giving personal experience its coordinates. If you, too, can find your own story somewhere in this deck, and it leaves you with some reflection, some comfort, or just a steadier sense of which way to go next — then maybe this will turn out to be a decent dose of Medicine.