Gender & Dao

Taipei, 2015

Gender & Dao was developed in Taipei in 2015 during an invited return to Taiwan, following earlier collaborations and exhibitions in the region. By that time, I was already in dialogue with local institutions — yet entering the philosophy faculty revealed a different layer of reality.

Taiwan’s academic environment is shaped by Confucian traditions, Daoist cosmology, colonial histories and democratic transformation. Within this intellectually rigorous structure, philosophy is studied with deep respect for lineage, textual precision and hierarchy. At the time of the project, however, there was not a single female professor of philosophy at the faculty. There were female students — intelligent, present, ambitious — but no woman occupying institutional authority.

The work emerged directly from this lived contradiction.

Together with female students, we subtly shifted the seminar space. By bringing leaves, branches and fragments from outside into the classroom, we disturbed the rational architecture of the interior. Desks were covered, the floor changed texture, the boundary between outside and inside softened. It was not a protest, but a spatial reconfiguration.

The gesture activated a palpable threshold — the suspended moment before something is declared inappropriate, before authority clarifies its limits. In that tension, female philosophical presence became visible.

Rather than explaining Daoism, Gender & Dao reflects on how inherited cosmological models continue to structure contemporary academic environments — and how female agency negotiates, inhabits and gently repositions itself within them.

The project marked an important moment in my practice: the recognition that philosophical discourse is not only textual, but spatial and embodied — and that visibility can begin with a quiet shift in the room.