PAST

Once a promise of freedom and boundless possibility, “the sky’s the limit” now rings with a different weight. Now that the skies have grown heavy, it is no longer an open space but a charged terrain shaped by surveillance, algorithmic systems, geopolitical tension, and global capital. What once symbolized movement and aspiration now reveals hidden architectures of control.

This exhibition reframes the once-hopeful slogan on its head: “The limit’s the skies.” Rather than a realm of boundless possibility, the skies have become a site of contradiction. Beneath the rhetoric of freedom and globalization lie conflicting realities, including the algorithmic governance, the ambivalence of migration and belonging, the commodification of travel, and the extractive infrastructures that sustain global circulation. These forces, acting together like turbulence, disturb our perception of the world and expose fissures in the ways we are conditioned to look. As emotion, memory, and the body are swept up in these accelerated conditions, turbulence comes to mean more than merely disruptions in air travel. It is the very condition of contemporary life: disoriented structures, blurred borders, and overstimulated senses that prompt us to rethink how we inhabit and connect with the world around us.

The airport, a familiar yet often overlooked site, serves as a conceptual anchor of the exhibition. It is a place of transit, surveillance, and delay, shaped by anticipation, regulation, and constant movement. As both a nexus of global connection and a site where the contradictions of our time are laid bare, the airport offers a lens through which we can resense and re-measure the world. In this exhibition, nine artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea engage with this condition of “turbulence” from different perspectives.