The Visible and the Invisible: An Ecophenomenology of House 17
Island Reverence-III 2026
-by Luchia Meihua Lee
Island Reverence explores the island not simply as a
geographical place, but as a living ecology where history, memory, nature,
architecture, and human experience continually shape one another. Situated
within the historic setting of House 17 on Governors Island, the August
exhibitions invite visitors to experience the island through movement,
perception, and material transformation.
Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenology of embodied perception and its ecological resonance, the
exhibition transforms House 17 into an experiential landscape where nature and
city, body and memory, life and death, and the visible and invisible become
intertwined. The nineteenth-century house is not merely a container for
artworks; its rooms, windows, changing daylight, wooden floors, and surrounding
landscape actively shape how each work is encountered. Walking through House 17
becomes an embodied journey in which perception itself is continually
transformed.
Visitors first enter Ming-Jer Kuo's
Memento Mori: Starry Night from Six Feet Under, a site-specific
installation that envelops the entire room in darkness. Large-scale vinyl
images derived from aerial surveys of nineteen New York City cemeteries extend
across the walls and ceiling, transforming individual tombstones into luminous
constellations. The subtitle, Starry Night from Six Feet Under, proposes
an impossible yet poetic point of view—as though viewers were looking upward
from beneath the earth. Rather than presenting memento mori simply as a
reminder of death, Kuo transforms mortality into a cosmic landscape where
memory, matter, and energy continue beyond physical life. The monumental
installation recalls the immersive ambition of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
ceiling, yet here the heavens are reimagined through the quiet geometry of
cemeteries, where the traces of human lives shimmer as stars.
Moving into Room 2, visitors
experience an immediate sensory transformation. Darkness gives way to light as Chung-Ying
Hou's Botanical Thinking unfolds within a luminous environment of
handmade paper, plant fibers, bark, leaves, and natural light. Rather than
representing nature, Hou allows natural materials themselves to become
collaborators in the making of the artwork. Suspended sheets of handmade paper
filter the daylight entering through House 17's historic windows, subtly
changing throughout the day. Seen from a distance, the installation gradually
forms the image of a giant fingerprint; as visitors move closer, the image
dissolves into fibers, textures, and traces of the papermaking process. Human
identity emerges from—and returns to—the material world. The architectural
transition from Kuo's black cemetery cosmos to Hou's bright botanical landscape
becomes a passage from mortality toward regeneration, where nature is
understood not as background but as a living process of continual
transformation.
The journey continues through Ricardo
Woo's QUE SERÁ SERÁ / Haja O Que Houver, a series of self-portraits
created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each painting presents two identities: on
one side the artist's living face, on the reverse a skeletal self-portrait.
Suspended throughout the breakfast room, the portraits interact with House 17's
historic windows, where the skulls emerge through the panes like ghostly
reflections. The windows become temporal thresholds rather than architectural
boundaries, allowing life and death, presence and absence, past and future to
occupy the same visual field. As viewers move through the installation,
portraits continually reveal and conceal their skeletal counterparts, reminding
us that identity itself remains fluid and continually becoming.
This dialogue between the visible and
invisible extends into I-Chin Sung's Impermanence and Our
Place. Drawing upon the image of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, the
guardian who accompanies beings through the realms between life and death, Sung
transforms traditional Buddhist iconography into a contemporary meditation on
impermanence. Radiant colors dissolve the distinction between body and
landscape, suggesting that transformation is not disappearance but continuous
becoming. Mortality is answered not with finality, but with compassion,
spiritual continuity, and renewal.
The exhibition concludes with Yi-Chi
Lin's Island Is Land, which expands the exhibition beyond the
architecture of House 17 toward a broader geography of movement and belonging.
Through layered video projections, photography, and synchronized clocks,
everyday images from Taiwan and New York unfold within a shared temporal field.
Harbors, streets, commuters, conversations, and seascapes intersect across a
twelve-hour time difference. Rather than presenting islands as isolated
territories, Lin reveals them as places connected through migration, memory,
labor, and everyday life. Geography becomes relationship, and distance becomes
another form of proximity.
Throughout House 17, each artist
transforms one condition of existence into another. Tombstones become
constellations. Plants become paper; paper becomes fingerprints. Portraits
become skeletons, while windows become temporal thresholds. Religious iconography
becomes a meditation on impermanence. Islands become lived places connected
across time and distance. These transformations are not simply represented;
they unfold through the embodied movement of visitors as they pass from room to
room. The architecture of House 17 itself becomes an active collaborator,
shaping the experience through light, space, material, and memory.
Moving through House 17 thus becomes
part of the artwork. Darkness and light, city and nature, interior and
exterior, presence and absence continually shift with our bodies and
perceptions. What becomes invisible does not disappear; it leaves traces, transforms,
and opens new possibilities for seeing and inhabiting the world.
Ultimately, Island Reverence proposes
that reverence is not only an attitude toward nature but a way of dwelling
within the world. Through the embodied journey of House 17, visitors encounter
an ecology of transformation in which memory, matter, architecture, landscape,
and human experience remain inseparable. The visible continually emerges from
the invisible, reminding us that every place—and every island—is sustained by
relationships extending far beyond what we can immediately see.
Footnotes
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945). This essay draws upon Merleau-Ponty's concept of embodied perception, which understands the body not as an object in space but as the primary means through which the world is experienced.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), especially "The Intertwining—The Chiasm." The title of this essay echoes Merleau-Ponty's unfinished philosophical project, which explores the reciprocal relationship between the visible world and the invisible structures of perception.
3. The term ecophenomenology refers to philosophical approaches that extend phenomenology toward ecological experience, emphasizing embodied relationships between human beings, place, landscape, and the more-than-human world. See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
4. Island Reverence was presented at TAAC House 17, Nolan Park, Governors Island, New York, from August 8 to September 13, 2026. The exhibition included:- Room 1
Memento Mori: Starry Night from Six Feet UnderA New Site-Specific Installation Project
Ming-Jer Kuo
- Room 2
Botanical Thinking
New Works Exhibition
Chung-Ying Hou
- Room 4
Island Is Land
Artist Residency Exhibition
Lin Yi-Chi
- Breakfast Room
QUE SERÁ SERÁ / Haja O Que Houver
Ricardo Woo
- Pantry Room
Our Place
I-Chin Sung
5. House 17 is located within Nolan Park on Governors Island, a nineteenth-century military officers' residential district that has been transformed into a public cultural campus. As part of the annual Governors Island Arts Organizations in Residence program, the historic architecture, natural landscape, and changing daylight form an integral component of the exhibition's curatorial framework.
6. The curatorial concept of "transformation through embodied perception" proposed in this essay describes the experiential sequence created by moving through House 17. Rather than presenting isolated artworks, the exhibition invites visitors to encounter successive transformations: tombstones become constellations; plants become paper, and paper becomes fingerprints; portraits become skeletons while windows become temporal thresholds; religious iconography becomes a meditation on impermanence; and islands become shared places of lived experience.
Selected Bibliography
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011.
Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge, 2015.
Ricardo Woo: QUE SERÁ SERÁ / Haja O Que Houver_IslandIsLand_KeyVisual.jpg)
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