■The Space Between—TSAI Meng-Chang Solo Exhibition
2026.08.29-2026.10.11

▍Opening Talk
08.29 Sat. 15:00
Speaker: TSAI Meng-Chang × Zheng Shenghua
(Assistant Professor, Tainan University of Technology Department of Fine Arts)
▍Opening
08.29 Sat. 16:30

Text / TSAI Meng-Chang

Since 2019, my ongoing series The City Without Railways has explored the marginal spaces created where railway lines divide the city, interrupting movement and circulation. These overlooked areas reveal traces of human activity and the layered histories of urban development. After several journeys that ended during off-peak hours, and after wandering through the quiet emptiness of railway stations, my attention gradually shifted toward the station itself—a place defined by passage and transition; a place of brief encounters and fleeting farewells; a place of arrival and departure, of returning and leaving. Such spaces are easily overlooked amid the rush of travel and transfers, yet they remain indispensable, silently sustaining the rhythms and operations of the city.

During my travels and archival research, I also discovered that the convenience of railway transportation once led many factories—including feed mills, petrochemical plants, and cement factories—to be established along railway lines. Numerous branch railways were built specifically to serve these industrial sites, though today most have disappeared, leaving behind only faint traces. Factories were, in fact, the focus of my earliest artistic practice. Although this subject was set aside as my perspective evolved, my work on The City Without Railways gradually brought me back to the industrial landscape. This return, however, comes from a different point of view and carries a new interpretation and aspiration. To distinguish these works from my earlier factory series, I initiated a new long-term project titled Factory B.

As I searched for a way to bring these two bodies of work together, I returned to the perspective through which I have long approached the external world: yearning and distance. Yearning projects desire, revealing the things one longs for, and becomes a way of understanding and relating to the world. Distance, on the other hand, is a constant reminder of the separation that remains between oneself and the world—of the many attempts to approach it that can never quite be fulfilled. Standing before an uncrossable distance, I find myself transferring emotion onto these subjects, accepting the feelings that emerge through the act of looking, and compressing them into a single suspended image. Through countless hours of painting, I attempt to measure what lies between myself and these subjects—what must be understood, and what perhaps must remain beyond reach.

John Berger wrote, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” For me, however, it is the relationship between the subject and myself that becomes the true object of contemplation. This resonance can never fully bridge the distance that separates us. It is precisely because it cannot be reached that yearning persists. And it is through distance that all practical purpose falls away, allowing prosperity and decay alike to be contemplated with equal stillness, until nothing remains but an unspoken understanding.