PAST

The Museum of NTUE, in collaboration with the National Culture and Arts Foundation’s “Curator’s Incubator Program @ Museums” program, will present the exhibition The Limit is The Turbulent Skies on August 29, curated by the collective Nn̄g Project.

The exhibition aims to immerse audiences in a state of “turbulence,” encouraging them to re-examine the present through the lens of a half-asleep, half-awake mid-flight dream and to reflect on the shared sky that connects our collective hopes and desires. The title playfully overturns the slogan “The sky’s the limit” by rephrasing it as “The limit’s the skies,” hinting that our visions of the future have already been rewritten. Now that the skies are no longer the boundless realm symbolizing freedom, progress, and transcendence of all limits, but an invisible terrain shaped by technology, surveillance, geopolitics, and global capital.

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 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” serves as a conceptual anchor of the exhibition, with HUANG Jia-Hong invited as the lead visual designer. Drawing on visual elements of airports such as boarding lines and information panels, the design guides visitors to reflect on a space that is familiar yet often overlooked, one imbued with anticipation, transit, regulation and constant movement.

In this exhibition, nine artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea engage with this condition of “turbulence” from different perspectives. In moments of turbulence, we may briefly lose our sense of direction. Yet it is in this very imbalance that we begin to recover our ability to feel. This journey, like a dream unfolding mid-flight, exists in a space between waking and sleep, between reality and imagination.