The Limit is the Turbulent Skies
(2025)
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.
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The Limit is the Turbulent Skies
Once a hopeful phrase of boundless potential, “The sky is the limit” echoed a time when the sky symbolized freedom, progress, and the pursuit of infinite possibility. Today, that sense of openness has been fundamentally transformed. The skies above us are increasingly shaped by invisible systems of surveillance, digital infrastructure, geopolitics, and global flows of capital and people. As we move through these skies, often unconsciously, it becomes harder to recognize the forces that define them. Can we still perceive the boundaries, the data trails, or the mechanisms of control that surround us?
By flipping the phrase to “The limit is the sky,” this exhibition challenges the polished narratives of freedom and global connectivity. Beneath the surface of what is often presented as connection and progress, some contradictions and pressures complicate how we move through the world. Environmental destruction, extreme commodification, cultural friction, and dislocation are just some of the forces that disturb our sense of orientation. These forces create turbulence not only in the air but in our senses, our emotions, and our bodies. Turbulence, here, becomes a state of being—restless, fragmented, disoriented. It signals a need to pause and recalibrate.
Thus, this exhibition turns to the “airport” as a site emblematic of these complexities. At once a gateway and a checkpoint, it is a place defined by motion and control, anticipation and surveillance. From this space of transit, we invite a different kind of encounter: one that asks how the world feels when we move through it, and one that invites us to pause and see differently.
Eight artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea take part in this collective reflection. Each responds to the experience of turbulence through a different lens:
Hong Jinhwon examines the invisible currents of digital data, questioning how algorithmic systems and cloud infrastructures govern our behaviors and choices, while imagining alternative spaces of informational freedom.
Loi Lai Lai Natalie draws on the imagery of migratory birds to reflect on the space between leaving and settling. Her work captures the emotional landscapes of those migrants who move, settle, and search for belonging within the rhythms of nature.
Lee Yuk Ki Florence uses animation to hold onto fleeting moments between departure and arrival. Her work portrays the solitude and disconnection that emerge in temporary spaces, creating a quiet sense of emotional distance.
Hsui Hou Lam critiques the culture of travel as shaped by capitalism. Her work explores how tourism and advertising create idealized images of femininity and desire, opening space to rethink the emotional and social values attached to tourism.
Chang Ting-Chen examines how global events are narrated and felt. Her work explores the emotional responses that emerge from shared images and stories, and the tensions between global currents and local histories.
Lin Yen-Hsiang focuses on airport infrastructure and its social implications, revealing how seemingly neutral zones of transit are in fact embedded in complex negotiations of power, land, and community.
Lo I-Chun investigates material culture as a site where histories of trade, labor, and warfare intersect, mapping the deep interconnections between mobility and violence.
Tseng Yen-Hsiang starts from the experience of flying and uses it to explore how bodies relate to space and materiality. His work invites a renewed attention to perception in motion.
These artistic voices offer more than critique. They open up new points of entry into the world. Through their works, turbulence becomes a space of possibility. Cracks in the system reveal paths for reimagining how we sense, move, and connect.
At its heart, The Limit is the Turbulent Skies asks: in an age where movement is constant and distance seems ever shrinking, in a world where constant movement defines our lives, can we still see the same sky from different perspectives? Are we truly drawing closer to one another? Or are we suspended in a shared disorientation, floating further apart? Rather than treating turbulence as a disruption, the exhibition approaches it as an opening. Amid confusion, we are invited to pause, to notice what often goes unseen, and to sense the forces that quietly shape our experiences.
This journey is like drifting into a dream while in flight. We are not fully awake, but not entirely asleep either. Suspended somewhere between reality and imagination, we move forward, together, through the turbulent skies.
