The Room of a Taiwanese Girl | Rowena Liao (廖若瑄)
15 June to 10 July, 5–7 March 2026
During her project-based residency at IAC, Rowena Liao develops "The Room of a Taiwanese Girl", an immersive installation exploring how cultural identity can be sensed rather than explained.
The work reconstructs the traces of a young Taiwanese girl’s bedroom through projection, objects, environmental sound, and subtle atmospheric elements. Visitors enter a Sunday afternoon in early summer 2012 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The girl herself never appears; instead, her presence is suggested through fragments of everyday life. Identity unfolds through spatial arrangement, material culture, and sensory experience. In this space, “Taiwaneseness” is not presented as a fixed narrative, but as an atmosphere – something that can be felt yet not fully grasped. Like a ghostly presence, it hovers between visibility and erasure, between intimacy and distance.
Working between Taiwan and Sweden, Liao approaches exhibition-making as a research practice. The residency serves as a site for testing how projection, sound, natural light, and spatial composition shape perception. The installation examines how domestic spaces function as extensions of the body and as sites where cultural meaning is translated through lived experience.
Rowena Liao (廖若瑄) is a research-based artist and visual culture researcher currently pursuing an M.A. in Visual Culture at Lund University. She holds a B.A. in Film from Shih Hsin University, Taiwan. Her early practice developed within Taiwan’s film industry, where she worked in directing and costume design across feature films, TV series, and short films. In 2023, she co-wrote and served as assistant director for the short film Coco & Nana, a quarter-finalist at SWIFF. Working between Taiwan and Sweden, Liao’s practice centers on Taiwanese national identity, cultural memory, and embodied perception. Through moving image, installation, and curatorial research, she explores how identity and history are sensed, spatialized, and translated across cultural contexts.
