Encroachment

Curatorial Observation
Wanrong Song
Founder, Curator


Montmartre Residency
Archive Vivant No. 002

“If everyone has their own understanding of borders, who has the authority to define them? And who holds the power to interpret them?”


— Wu Chen

The day Wu Chen arrived in Paris, I went to meet her at Gare du Nord.

She had travelled from London on the Eurostar, carrying a suitcase filled with the Lego works she had made.
I stood on tiptoe as passengers emerged one after another. Still, I could not see her.
A few minutes later, my phone rang. Wu Chen had been stopped at customs. She did not speak French, and the officer did not speak English. Each spoke a language the other could not understand.
Then, through hesitant English, one word finally emerged:
Control.

Later, Wu Chen told me that she could not understand why, among all the passengers who had stepped off the same train, she was the only one to be stopped.
She then opened her suitcase and took out two works centred on the Chinese and British passports.
It was at that moment that I began to understand. Her question was not simply about two passports. It concerned the way a person attempts to define themselves between two systems while being continually defined by the gaze of others.

A few days later, while we were installing the exhibition, I found myself alone in front of one of her works. I remained there for a long time. At some point, I no longer knew how to look.
The body was constructed from Lego. As I moved closer, it disappeared. When I stepped back, it reappeared. I thought I could see it, yet I could never quite reach the body.
Much later, while rereading Giorgio Agamben’s Nudities, I felt that this experience had finally found its language. For Agamben, nakedness is never an original state. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were clothed in a “garment of glory.” Only when that glory disappears does the body become visible as a naked body, exposed to the gaze of others.
In Wu Chen’s work, the Lego is perhaps not a garment. It neither conceals the body nor restores it. Instead, it transforms the conditions through which the body becomes visible. The body remains, but so does a distance—as though a layer of pixels persisted between it and us.
Little by little, I understood that perhaps it was not the body that was eluding me.
It was my own gaze.

When I returned to stand before these works, something had shifted. I came to understand that Wu Chen had never refused to be seen. What she refused was a gaze that had forgotten its own limits.
The passport. The body. The image.
Each time, a border appeared to move.
When a gaze begins to name someone, to classify them, to interpret them and, ultimately, to define who they are, it has already crossed a line.
Perhaps this is where encroachment begins.
Not through an overtly violent gesture, but through an almost imperceptible shift: a way of looking that has become so familiar that it no longer perceives itself.
It moves between body, image, memory and power. It enters the spaces that separate them, silently redrawing their contours. Almost without our awareness, it transforms the way we inhabit the world.
Everywhere, and yet almost invisible.

Since then, I have not looked in quite the same way.
Perhaps that is what Encroachment is.
Not the act of crossing a border,
but the quiet displacement of a gaze.