how to fold a paper airplane
(the book)
(the book)
How to Fold A Paper Airplane
Printing: Risograph
Edition: 50
Tung Lin Tsai, 2025
Printing: Risograph
Edition: 50
Tung Lin Tsai, 2025
My book began with a question and a terrible dream.
In late 2023, I returned to Taiwan to vote. Life there appeared unchanged; breakfast shops opened and scooters weaved through traffic. Yet beneath this ordinary surface, tensions were rising as Chinese military activity in the Taiwan Strait intensified. Media coverage outside the island portrayed a crisis that seemed disconnected from Taiwan's daily rhythms. While Western headlines warned of imminent conflict, local life continued uninterrupted. Taiwan embodied this duality: crisis and normalcy coexisting.
In my recurring dreams, a giant red paper airplane hovers above Taipei, sometimes drifting across a table. The absurdity of this image serves as a fragile reminder of the island's current state. Taiwan's everyday life exists alongside a constant shadow of threat. While people ride their scooters to work daily, Chinese PLA fighter jets conduct military operations throughout the Taiwan Strait. My absurd dream essentially became a question that haunts me: "How can we photograph something that has not yet happened?"
The structure of How to Fold a Paper Airplane responds to this question with a conversation between what is seen and what is withheld. Its sequencing moves between visual stillness and sudden interruption, while yellow thread and predominant red elements infuse the act of reading with political colors. The experience shifts depending on how the book is handled: flipping from left to right, the reader encounters mostly blank red pages; from right to left, the photographs emerge. When turning the book page by page, short texts appear, quietly bridging the gaps between the red pages and the images, offering a fragmented story that neither fully explains nor entirely conceals.
Within this shifting rhythm, the photographs embrace the mundane: plastic bags, scooters, and awkward street corners. These fragments of daily life feel both ordinary and irreplaceable. As the sequence unfolds, these scenes do not flow uninterrupted; they are broken by red voids that suspend the gaze and by brief lines of text that surface between images. These interruptions do not merely divide the pages, but press against the images and reveal another layer of narrative.
My book, How to Fold a Paper Airplane, is not a history, nor a prediction. It is the absurd dream I have had. It is a red paper airplane navigating the undercurrent of the Taiwan Strait.
In late 2023, I returned to Taiwan to vote. Life there appeared unchanged; breakfast shops opened and scooters weaved through traffic. Yet beneath this ordinary surface, tensions were rising as Chinese military activity in the Taiwan Strait intensified. Media coverage outside the island portrayed a crisis that seemed disconnected from Taiwan's daily rhythms. While Western headlines warned of imminent conflict, local life continued uninterrupted. Taiwan embodied this duality: crisis and normalcy coexisting.
In my recurring dreams, a giant red paper airplane hovers above Taipei, sometimes drifting across a table. The absurdity of this image serves as a fragile reminder of the island's current state. Taiwan's everyday life exists alongside a constant shadow of threat. While people ride their scooters to work daily, Chinese PLA fighter jets conduct military operations throughout the Taiwan Strait. My absurd dream essentially became a question that haunts me: "How can we photograph something that has not yet happened?"
The structure of How to Fold a Paper Airplane responds to this question with a conversation between what is seen and what is withheld. Its sequencing moves between visual stillness and sudden interruption, while yellow thread and predominant red elements infuse the act of reading with political colors. The experience shifts depending on how the book is handled: flipping from left to right, the reader encounters mostly blank red pages; from right to left, the photographs emerge. When turning the book page by page, short texts appear, quietly bridging the gaps between the red pages and the images, offering a fragmented story that neither fully explains nor entirely conceals.
Within this shifting rhythm, the photographs embrace the mundane: plastic bags, scooters, and awkward street corners. These fragments of daily life feel both ordinary and irreplaceable. As the sequence unfolds, these scenes do not flow uninterrupted; they are broken by red voids that suspend the gaze and by brief lines of text that surface between images. These interruptions do not merely divide the pages, but press against the images and reveal another layer of narrative.
My book, How to Fold a Paper Airplane, is not a history, nor a prediction. It is the absurd dream I have had. It is a red paper airplane navigating the undercurrent of the Taiwan Strait.