The solo exhibition"Go to Rome"

The solo exhibition "Go To Rome" in 2021 revolves around the fragmented significance network resulting from narratives of different ideologies in history, focusing on the travelogue of a missionary. I intend to interpret the clues formed between works of different forms as fragments of a fictional historical manuscript. Twelve installations serve as punctuation marks for these fragments, scattered throughout the exhibition hall, awaiting the audience to peel away the geological layers of events and solve the mysteries.
In 1651, Michel Boym (1612–1659) was commissioned by the Yongli Emperor of the Southern Ming Dynasty. As an envoy, he traveled from Macau, Goa, and the Mughal Empire to Persia, Anatolia, and Smyrna, eventually reaching Rome. There, he sought military assistance from the nominal leader of European spirituality, Pope Innocent X. During this eight-year-long journey, his identity oscillated between Ming diplomatic envoy, missionary, naturalist, geographer, botanist, and pagan. Ultimately rejected by people holding different ideological stances, he died on the Vietnam border. Amidst his missionary travels, Michel Boym left behind drawings of flora and fauna out of scattered curiosity, lost in the shadows of history but pieced together through fragments recorded in both Eastern and Western anecdotes. Encounters between material substances resemble wormholes, connecting many portals of history as evidence. These portals, like the red and blue poles of a magnet, are inherently unified yet opposed to each other.