Texy by Elanor Wang

Yen Chun Lin has transformed two basement galleries in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum into a dark, borderless space evoking a cave or an air-raid shelter. Instead of relying on sight, which dominates both contemporary art and daily life, visitors navigate the exhibition through sound: the resonance of waves, the rhythm of breath, and the subtle movement of cold air swirling through the space.

Lin structures Whorl Whirr as a time-based performance. The exhibition consists of Sumnium Susurrus (15 min) and Tunnel (45 min, co-created with Gediminas Žygus), alternating in a continuous one-hour cycle each day.

The first room is dedicated to Sumnium Susurrus, a dark space filled with 16 dynamic, acyclic dragonfly-inspired installations that pulse in shifting rhythms. The work stems from a personal encounter between Lin and a dragonfly which she found on a road one day. It stayed with her the entire day. They walked, ate, and even slept together until it passed away in her arms. Lin still remembers the delicate grip of its feet and its final breath.

She seeks to represent the blurred in-between state; where life transitions from matter to non-matter, movement to stillness. In collaboration with Okome Studio, she has created 16 dynamic installations, embedding digital signals into speaker units that animate both the sculptures and the sound.

During this 15-minute poetic experience, visitors move quietly through the space, which feels like a small, dark forest of dragonflies.  They observe the subtle motion of the flying sculptures just as Lin did that day with her dragonfly. As the piece concludes, a white mist rises like fog, gently guiding visitors out of the forest and into the next room.

Co-created by Lin and Gediminas Žygus, Tunnel extends their exploration of dreams.

They transform the white cube into a dusky tunnel, both a physical and psychological passage, which connects different realities and dreams. Lin imagines sound and echo as the spirit of tunnels and mountains, and the tunnel itself as a repository for collective dreams. At the end of the tunnel, a film plays without visuals with only sound and subtitles appearing, revealing fragments of subconscious thought. For 45 minutes, the screen remains completely black as occasional words drift across, gradually weaving a story that unfolds through the tunnel, dreams, and the ocean – another space where collective dreams are stored.

Lin and Žygus collect sounds and transform them into musical compositions using synthesisers. The story they construct shapes the arrangement of these sound fragments. They work with MONOM Studio to visualise sound, making its movement in the space tangible, becoming the specific sound experience in TFAM. As visitors enter, the whispers and soft, scattered noises they create become part of another collective echo lingering within the exhibition space.

Personally, I find the absence of images and narrative liberating. It allows me to surrender to sound, letting it construct an entire world on its own. My friend, however, sees the subtitles as a hook, drawing him into the artists’ world.

“Tunnel is a mischievous experiment”, says Lin. Whether the audience focuses on the screen or not is part of the experience. In a world where information relentlessly competes for attention through social media and streaming, content grows increasingly exaggerated. Lin wanted to create a space for pause, a retreat inward, where visitors can listen and explore their own thoughts.

“People don’t need to watch a film through images. You can watch a film with your eyes closed sometimes.” Lin continues.

The subtitles serve as an anchor, while sound acts as a guide, leading the audience into a deeper engagement with the story. At the center of the gallery, Lin has placed a platform where visitors can lie down, rest, or even sleep which serves as a shelter from the overwhelming flood of information.

I particularly appreciate the passage between the key visual wall and the entrance. Designed to block out light, the wall unexpectedly becomes a space of emotional transition. Visitors stepping out of the exhibition find themselves in a quiet moment of reflection – a pause before returning to reality.