The Endless Ends

The Two Ends of an Endless Continuum
/Yves Chunta Chiu

Duration” (durée), as articulated by French philosopher Henri Bergson, differs from standardized and linear conceptions of time. It refers instead to a mode of temporal perception interwoven through body, memory, and relationships, and is understood through the notion of creative evolution as a vital impulse of life. Wang Yi-Ting has long engaged with this philosophy of temporal experience, manifesting it in her explorations of the life and death of natural forms and materials, the audiovisual qualities of rhythm and sound, and the relational dynamics between landscape and movement. Her works thus articulate both a perceptual field of duration and a generative field of relations.
The Two Ends of an Endless Continuum asks how duration enables the reconnection, reconfiguration, and resonance of elements that would otherwise remain unrelated, thereby generating creative boundaries and extending new modes of perception. Wang conceives time as a material that can be suspended, juxtaposed, and reassembled. Through strategies of pause, simultaneity, and rhythm, she brings disparate elements into a shared perceptual experience, revealing temporal dislocations and dynamic processes of growth and absence. After receiving her MFA from the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée in 2016, her practice has been shaped by European contemporary art discourse, particularly her interest in philosophy, abstraction, and formal experimentation. Upon returning to Taiwan, her work Disembodied Posture (2019) was selected for the Taipei Art Awards, exploring the redefinition and transformation of life and death within duration, and she was subsequently invited to participate in the exhibition Magie Verte in Bordeaux, France.
“Measurement” has consistently functioned as a methodological framework in Wang’s practice. Rather than relying on standardized metrics, she emphasizes bodily scales—walking distance, viewing height, and the amplitude of movement—using these subjective measurements to integrate lived experience into her work. Through what she terms “spatial sketching,” she creates rhythms in which time and space flow through the body, recalibrating the meaning of perception and observation. Such experiments are evident in Passage (2019) at the Madou Sugar Industry Art Festival and Impromptu, and further developed in her solo exhibition Sea Rhythm and Coastline Project (2023) at MoCA Studio, Taipei, which focuses on measuring the boundaries of landscapes. Here, Wang extends her inquiry into duration toward larger geographical scales and the interwoven relationship between bodily perception and spatial experience. Through coastal fieldwork and a series of installations, videos, sculptures, and prints, she re-measures and re-presents the distance between humans and the sea, transforming the infinite expanse of the coastline into a rhythmic field. The ocean is no longer a distant backdrop, but a continuation of time and a resonance of the body. In this context, continuity is not merely temporal extension, but a dynamic interplay between vision, body, and landscape. Measurement, rather than defining the world, becomes an experiment in rhythm—an attempt to uncover alternative ways of perceiving beyond rational logic.
The works presented in this exhibition, Coastline Project and Earthline Series, represent a significant development in this trajectory. Coastline Project begins from Taiwan’s shoreline as an experimental practice of fieldwork and measurement, focusing on the durée embedded in the unique rhythms produced by natural and human forces that shape, rupture, and transform the coastline as a boundary. Landline Series, by contrast, originates in the Mongolian steppe, a landscape profoundly unfamiliar to island dwellers. Through bodily measurement, the artist articulates this ambiguous state of boundary: “It is not a line, but a zone with thickness, constantly shifting. It resembles an unattainable utopia, filled with a sense of breathing.” These explorations of two “ends” articulate an ongoing inquiry into duration and reveal how boundaries continuously emerge, shift, create, and evolve through the intertwined experiences of body and time, forming a field that endlessly extends and never reaches closure.