This is a video-based field research project created with the participation of people experiencing homelessness. Initiated in 2023, the project has gone through several phases of presentation, including exhibition installations and moving-image documentation. This publication marks the book edition of the project. Each manifestation constitutes an independent work.

Boundaries – Private Lines under Public Gaze places disposable cameras in the hands of participants, inviting them to photograph people and moments encountered in their everyday lives, forming a micro-scale, self-defined practice of existence. Over the course of one week, a total of 190 photographs were produced. Three participants chose to document encounters from their daily routines, while two homeless couples photographed one another. Intimacy and distance, shelter and exposure intertwine; through these images emerge distinct modes of being, and the unique private boundaries each participant delineates under conditions of constant public visibility.

Within the book, these photographs are enclosed inside the pages, forming intimate zones that belong to the participants themselves. To view them, the reader must physically open the pages—symbolically crossing a boundary—and peer through the slit-like gap, entering an ethical field structured by distance and intimacy with others.

Viewing thus becomes an exchange of positions. We no longer occupy a position of dominant gaze; instead, we are compelled to acknowledge the other as fundamentally incomprehensible. Who possesses the power to look? Who decides how they are seen? Who has the right to a backstage? Which forms of looking are permitted, and which constitute extraction? Each act of peering becomes a reflexive experience of one’s own position. In looking at the other, can we learn not to strip them of subjectivity?

Boundaries – Private Lines under Public Gaze is a publishing experiment that treats the book itself as an ethical mechanism—restructuring a field of vision in which the perspectives of unhoused participants can emerge. Homelessness, understood here as a fluid survival technique, is translated into negotiations of image, scale, placement, and modes of looking. The project re-centers forms of existence most often rendered invisible in the city, returning them to the core of the politics of visibility.

       Preface to the Second Edition

I often chase myself with a line from the film Desert of Nabiya : “What kind of face do you think you have, calling yourself a creator? If things made by people like you were to flood this world, it would be pure poison—everyone would suffer. Instead of this, shouldn’t you think concretely about what you can do for others?”

Caught between art’s desire to intervene in reality and its refusal to be reduced to a functional tool, I found no god to turn to, trapped in a deadlock.

“Think for yourself—aren’t you a creator?”


The 2023 field project Boundaries – Private Lines under Public Gaze, begun almost by accident, marked my first genuine encounter with the outside—and my first attempt to learn how to retreat within creation. Having only hastily swallowed fragments of qualitative research methods during school, let alone any grounding in research ethics, I set out in ignorance, armed merely with the limited gestures and frameworks of contemporary art.


What followed was a nearly irreconcilable nausea between artistic action and ethics. Within the sterilized discourse of contemporary art, complex realities are transformed into flat materials—made viewable, aestheticized, legitimized, romanticized, decontextualized, rendered harmless—and neatly archived within art systems that justify themselves. Meaning is generated too quickly; ethical discomfort is prematurely resolved. Subjects are extracted from their original temporalities and contexts, becoming evidence of the artist’s self-extension—a climax of “emotional possession” and “ethical evasion.”


“Refusing to speak on behalf of subjects,” “de-centering authority,” or “not consuming subjects as material” are all insufficient. When I elegantly defended myself with words like “participation,” “dialogue,” and “care,” such political correctness functioned as a form of preemptive obedience. It demanded self-censorship and self-justification before creation even began, disinfecting oneself in advance of potential critique. The nausea returned. I felt guilty—as though guilt itself could be revolutionary—exposing my stable external position and my language already disciplined by governance.


In order to work through this impasse, I began engaging with organizations involved in poverty and homelessness advocacy. Beyond what services they provide, I became equally concerned with how they articulate their actions. I sought a complete counterpoint to contemporary art’s libidinal qualitative transmutation: the practices of care workers. Unexpectedly, I discovered familiar sterilization mechanisms within some advocacy strategies—particularly an emphasis on “dialogue,” framed as nonviolent and open, premised on the belief that genuine change arises not from unilateral pressure but from restructured relationships. Yet this framing overlooks how dialogue is often deployed by power institutions as a pacifying mechanism, its political force aestheticized and neutralized. This exposes a blind spot within Taiwan’s middle-class embrace of “participatory design” and “dialogue-based advocacy,” where dialogue is upheld as goodwill without necessarily confronting structural conditions. Here, dialogue replaces conflict rather than generating it.


In contrast stands Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (KADAMAY), an alliance organized by the urban poor in the Philippines, advocating for social housing, land rights, and housing justice. In Bulacan, the government had built thousands of social housing units that remained vacant for years, starkly contradicting the immense demand for housing. In 2017, KADAMAY initiated an occupation of empty social housing, framing vacancy as a symbol of the state’s failure to realize housing rights. They occupied units, erected barricades, blocked evictions, and advanced the slogan “Homes for the homeless.” Through sustained pressure and negotiation, the government ultimately adjusted its policy, recognizing the occupiers’ right to reside—turning the action into a landmark case in public housing and urban poverty discourse.


This occupation redefined the boundaries of the “public” through the bodies and time of the poor. Beyond dialogue, KADAMAY generated an “ungovernable language,” allowing imbalance, disorder, and even the suspension of legality. Precisely at the moment when those deemed incapable of speech begin to speak, dialogue becomes a condition for political events. KADAMAY thus offers a powerful example: a form of life that persistently exposes itself at the margins of the system, refusing integration.


This example led me to reflect on the shared ethos between anarchism and artistic practice: a bottom-up refusal of authoritarian narratives and the legitimacy of grand histories. Art often preserves or generates minor narratives in the cracks of dominant structures, bringing overlooked identities, communities, and memories into visibility. Anarchism similarly focuses on those excluded from state and capital orders, intervening in reality through the simplest means. Here, art and anarchism harmonize in honoring marginal positions, excavating structural conditions that silence voices. Practices such as guerrilla art—temporary organizations and micro-actions—and self-publishing, which produces knowledge outside official discourse to resist ideological censorship, profoundly destabilized my artistic posture. This is the logic of reversal at the extreme.


Shaped by academic art training, I developed an almost compulsive obsession with aligning form and content, habitually pushing form toward seamless perfection. Yet once self-consistency reaches a certain threshold, it collapses into a vacuum of speechlessness: viewers are compelled to praise formal completeness rather than confront their own habits of reading. In contrast, I am drawn to grassroots, wild, low-tech, guerrilla practices, because they carry an undisciplined vitality. I admire looseness in others’ work, yet return to my own practice proving legitimacy through control and rigor, as a gesture of responsibility. I oscillate between resisting incorporation and relying on stable frameworks to ensure legibility, producing works that contradict themselves.


Ethics is an “infinite responsibility toward the other.” Every act of display and representation is already a transformation. Between intervention and withdrawal, I attempt to turn myself into a space of being-with.


I therefore began seeking a structured looseness: leaving gaps within structure, manufacturing flaws, allowing the work to oscillate between completeness and incompleteness. I came to realize that incomprehensibility itself can be a form of radicality—distinct from earlier logics of radical subtraction. I had to shift from producing elegantly ambiguous meaning toward rough exposure—rendering existing modes of reading inoperative, refusing closure under any single aesthetic or interpretation. Remaining neither here nor there, the work sustains fissures resistant to institutional absorption. Through retreat, incomprehensibility becomes the condition of the work’s existence. To present an untrainable work is to approach a genuine state of suspension.


The key lies in making the traces of transformation visible—allowing mediation, failure, and unease to leave stains. Yet being-with is not innocent; my intervention inevitably carries hierarchy. Perhaps honest creation lies in exposing the conditions of representation, admitting one’s powerlessness, refusing consolation. Rather than confessing, I choose to exploit my ambivalent position to generate contradiction, letting distortion become form. The artist no longer commands the archive but is instead swallowed by it—occupied by relations, driven into speechlessness by ethics.


True empathy is no longer understanding, but shared speechlessness—we expose ourselves to difference together. Political correctness builds order atop ethics; speechlessness exposes existence beneath it. Perhaps the real ethical shift does not lie in whether one takes material, but in whether the viewer becomes aware that they are watching—and, within that awareness, repositions their own ethical stance. There is no redemption there, only the choice to remain uneasily present.