Revisiting Personal Histories through the Lens of Food: The Artistic Practice of Lin, Hsin-Mei in Croatia’s “No One Is an Island”
Food as a Gateway to Memory
In Marcel Proustrsquos masterpiece,Agrave la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), the protagonist tastes a petite madeleine, an act that awakens childhood memories long buried in the depths of his subconscious and sends them flooding back in waves. This classic literary moment reveals the profound power of the human senses, particularly taste and smell, as triggers for memory. Compared to images or texts, which often carry explicit semiotic weight, the senses can offer a gentler and more universally resonant path, illuminating the way toward obscured histories.
Within Taiwanese contemporary art, we frequently see artists employing similar sensory mediums to navigate collective memory. In recent years, artist Wu, Ma-Li has frequently utilized food and textiles, materials imbued with the essence of ldquodomesticityrdquo and ldquofeminine daily life,rdquo to weave together and unearth micro-histories of the common people and the marginalized, who are often forgotten by official grand narratives. Artist Pan, Pin-Yu, in her workFamily Recipes, has explored themes of family, history, and culture in a foreign land through the lens of her motherrsquos cooking. Similarly, younger artist like Cheng, Jen-Pei have spent years conducting in-depth interviews and workshops to collect memories surrounding diet and migration across different ethnic groups, exploring identity and the history of displacement.
Lin, Hsin-Mei follows the artistic path of ldquosenses, food, memory, and movementrdquo in her worksCollective Memory Wavesand The Unknown Journey, which are featured in the Croatian exhibition No One Is an Island. She utilizes food as a point of departure, treating it as a medium to revisit personal histories from the White Terror period. However, she distinguishes herself by integrating her identity as a teacher, co-creating with students through art education to blur the boundaries between pedagogy and creative practice. For her, artistic creation is not merely a visual presentation, but rather a form of Socially Engaged Art. She hopes this project will guide the younger generation into cross-generational dialogues with their elders, prying open the doors of memory that may have been bolted shut by war, exile, political martial law, or generational divides.
Collective Memory Waves (2025). Spatial installation. Salon Galić, Split, Croatia. Photo credit: Salon Galić.
From Norway to Croatia
The No One Is an Island project originated from a collaborative creative project conceived by Lin , Hsin-Mei and Lin, Pei-Han during their residency at the SEANSE Arts Centre in Norway in 2024. The title ldquoNo One Is an Islandrdquo appropriates the famous line ldquoNo Man Is an Islandrdquo from the 17th-century English poet John Donne, signifying that no individual can exist independently of the world. The artists believe this verse aptly mirrors Taiwanrsquos current reality. Beyond being a geographic island, Taiwan has long existed in a state of isolation within the international political arena, a condition often described as ldquoStatus Undetermined.rdquo For Taiwanese people growing up in this predicament, frequent feelings of loss and aphasia occur when facing questions of self-identity and historical narratives.
In 2025, the exhibition traveled to Croatia, showing in Split at Salon Galić (Note 1), which is managed by the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HULU Split), and in the capital, Zagreb, at Galerija Kamba. Moving from the fjords of Northern Europe to the Balkan Peninsula on the Mediterranean was more than a mere geographical shift it opened a transnational dialogue on traumatic histories. Having experienced prolonged political repression under the Yugoslav regime and a subsequent War of Independence in the 1990s, Croatia struggled to forge its own national subjectivity through the multiple regime changes. This historical arc resonates deeply and intertextually with Taiwanrsquos complex identity, which was shaped by Cold War geopolitics and the legacy of Martial Law.
For Lin, Hsin-Mei, who spent time working and studying abroad, Taiwanrsquos political predicament is not an abstract concept it has profoundly affected her daily life. She observed that as a Taiwanese passport holder abroad, she often felt an underlying anxiety that her identity would be oversimplified or misunderstood when she introduced herself to strangers, a phenomenon that led her to become quite cautious. What should have been a given, onersquos identity, became a subject requiring constant explanation and debate in international settings.
This unease did not vanish upon return to Taiwan. Instead, Lin, Hsin-Mei discovered that collective historical scars were undergoing a ldquostructural forgettingrdquo in contemporary life. Whether in the brief, sanitized accounts found in school textbooks or in the ritualized commemoration days, history has lost the opportunity to engage in a meaningful dialogue with individual lives. Driven by this concern, she began an experiment: using art education to bridge grand historical narratives and personal sensory experiences, so that unresolved historical wounds can be seen in a softer light. This is also the foundational impetus for the works Collective Memory Waves and The Unknown Journey featured in the exhibition No One Is an Island.
No One Is an Island
Collective Memory Waves is an installation composed entirely of paper. Lin, Hsin-Mei, in collaboration with Lin, Pei-Han who brings her architectural background to the work, transformed 270 field research reports collected from Taiwanese students into a physical installation. In the exhibition space, the papers record various food memories, escape routes, and fragments of daily life for families. The visual landscape is created by stacking and suspending the ribbon-like strips in space. Rather than directly displaying them individually like archival documents, the installation preserves the privacy of personal histories for the reader. The installation captures the essence of collective memorymdashhow it stays connected even when it feels fragmented or broken by history.
Another work, The Unknown Journey, is presented through Mixed Reality. Utilizing MR technology (Note 2), Lin, Hsin-Mei has populated a virtual space with ten suitcases, each constructed from student family histories. Each suitcase is labeled with thematic keywords such as ldquoHunger,rdquo ldquoMigration,rdquo or ldquoHomelessnessrdquo with various related objects inside. By holding a tablet and tapping these objects on the screen, viewers can hear the hidden family stories behind them. For instance, when a student mentioned the ldquocoastlinerdquo from their grandfatherrsquos memory of fleeing war, Lin, Hsin-Mei reconstructed oceanic imagery, such as seafood or the sight of a child lying on a beach, to create a visual model and narrative within the suitcase that resonates deeply with the grandfatherrsquos recollection.
Collective Memory Waves: Traces of Archives and Shadows (2025). Spatial Installation. Galerija Kamba, Zagreb, Croatia. Photo Credit: Lin, Hsin-Mei.
The Unknown Journey Interactive Scene: Mixed Reality Suitcases (2025). Mixed Reality interactive experience. Galerija Kamba, Zagreb, Croatia. Photo Credit: Galerija Kamba / Photography: Juraj Vuglač. Collective Memory Waves: Traces of Archives and Shadows (2025). Spatial Installation. Galerija Kamba, Zagreb, Croatia. Photo Credit: Galerija Kamba / Photography: Juraj Vuglač.
Art Education as Methodology
These two works came from a year-long collaboration at a local junior high. Lin, Hsin-Mei worked with teachers from different subjects, using various stories and texts to slowly introduce the students to the history of the White Terror.
Initially, Lin, Hsin-Mei chose The Diary of Anne Frank to explore individual life stories within extreme social conditions. To avoid causing psychological anxiety or defensiveness in students because of the heaviness of the history, she intentionally fragmented the text of the diary, placing the cut-out pieces of text into envelopes for students to draw and read. Furthermore, the project led students on field trips to sites of injustice, such as the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park. Within the narrow, dim, and oppressive cells, students observed the sense of physical suffocation and discomfort of the space. Lin, Hsin-Mei subsequently distilled this somatic experience of being trapped and restricted into the creative vehicle of the ldquosuitcaserdquo in The Unknown Journey.
Beyond this, the suitcases carry yet another, gentler layer of imagery for Lin, Hsin-Mei, one inspired by the classic British childrenrsquos tale, Paddington Bear. This bear, always wearing a hat and carrying an old suitcase filled with his most treasured belongings, is a symbol of the refugee children Britain took in from continental Europe during World War II. This connection ensures that the suitcases in The Unknown Journey are not merely confined spaces, but vessels carrying the precious memories of a collective.
Finally, the project utilizes the relatively gentle and non-threatening medium of ldquofoodrdquo as a catalyst. Students were invited to act as ldquofamily history reporters,rdquo interviewing their elders about a dish that made a deep impression on their lives or a specific memory involving food. This method not only brought a compelling narrative tension to the artworks but also sparked profound intergenerational dialogues within the classroom. For example, one student found out that their grandfather, as a child, was nearly arrested for playfully tearing a political propaganda poster off a utility pole. In terror, the entire family packed overnight and fled across the sea from mainland China to Taiwan. This harrowing memory, once buried and deemed ldquounspeakablerdquo within the family, was remembered once again through this art project.
The Unknown Journey: Multi-Perspective Display of Mixed Reality (MR) Suitcases (2025). Mixed Reality interactive experience. Galerija Kamba, Zagreb, Croatia. Photo Credit: Galerija Kamba / Photography: Juraj Vuglač.
Opening Performance: A Sonic Ritual for Summoning Memory (2025). Galerija Kamba, Zagreb, Croatia. Photo Credit: Galerija Kamba / Photography: Juraj Vuglač.
A Gentle Revisit
Returning to the exhibition site of No One Is an Island, the universal affective power of food and everyday life history found a profound resonance in Croatia. One local girl shared a story about her grandmother, who had escaped from a concentration camp. The first food she ate was a ldquoyellow lemon.rdquo That tasted sweet and sour, and that was also a familiar flavor for the girl throughout her own childhood. This sensory experience did more than just traverse the intergenerational trauma of the Balkan Peninsula it effectively stitched together the historical experiences of Taiwan and Croatia.
Cross-Border Exchange of Memories: From Croatia to Taiwan (2025). Galerija Kamba, Zagreb, Croatia. Photo Credit: Lin, Hsin-Mei.
While Lin, Hsin-Mei chose art education as a method for the horizontal connection of collective memory, the other artist in the exhibition, Lin, Pei-Han, approached the theme through her own family history. Drawing from her grandfatherrsquos diaries, she traced a life that spanned the Japanese colonial period, the Martial Law era, and the eventual transition to democratization. Through this private narrative, she examined the various forms of oppression imposed by different colonial regimes across eras. Simultaneously, she translated her grandfatherrsquos words into a video installation. By intentionally narrating the voiceover in her own non-fluent Taiwanese Hokkien, she manifested the loss and rupture of individual language and identity caused by colonial history and historical fissures.
Within this framework, No One Is an Island revealed how these two artists handled historical memory through both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Lin, Pei-Han gazed deeply into the vertical depth of individual lives inherited from the generation to which her grandfather belonged meanwhile, Lin, Hsin-Mei, through her immersion in the educational field, aggregated the private family memories of 270 students into a horizontal, alternative historical landscape.
In contrast to the often confrontational and polarized stances found in public discourse, projects of this offer a gentler approach to revisiting history. They attend to the subtle, forgotten corners, ensuring that looking back is not merely about illuminating the past, but about reflecting the presentmdashallowing us to see the intersections where individuals truly connect.
No One Is an Island : Setting Sail for Memories Across Borders (2024). SEANSE Art Center, Norway. Photo Credit: Seanse Art Center / Photography: Kristian Glomnes.
The Unknown Journey Participatory Practice: Reflections on Islands and Shifting Identities (2025). Taipei, Taiwan. Photo Credit: Lin, Hsin-Mei.
Note 1: Established in 1924 and located in Split, Croatia, Salon Galić is the cityrsquos oldest continuously operating professional gallery and is currently designated as a national cultural heritage site. The space is managed by HULU Split (the Croatian Association of Visual Artists in Split). Founded in 1945, HULU Split is recognized as one of Croatiarsquos most authoritative and influential professional art organizations.
Note 2: The Unknown Journey utilizes Mixed Reality (MR) technology to precisely anchor virtual objects within the physical exhibition space through Spatial Anchoring. Unlike traditional Virtual Reality (VR), MR allows viewers to maintain their perception of the real environment while engaging in non-linear interactions with virtual ldquomemory suitcasesrdquo via handheld mobile devices..