Taipei: A Reservoir is a site-specific publication that transcribes and documents the mnemonic associations I’ve accrued with my annual trips back to Taiwan. Surprisingly, these infrequent trips have played a major role in my personal development and better understanding of my lineal heritage. Through a series of short form stories with illustrations, this project documents the remnants of my childhood memories that are somewhat salvageable and accessible in a country that has remained the same even after all these years.
“Taipei has become a reservoir of preserved memories that I still somewhat have access to.”
The manifesto of this personal project emerged as collateral inspiration to a school project that I worked on for my final project done for my ‘Typography 3’ class. The assignment was to develop a brand and utilize typography to communicate the word “home” and its subjective feeling and meaning to you.
The first time I stayed in Taiwan for more than two weeks, I had just graduated from RISD and was suffering from post-finals burnout and decided to flee to the homeland instead of looking for a new job to take care of my grandma who was sick at the time. During that period of time, I had enough time to embed myself within Taiwanese culture and document the oh so beautiful memories I’ve had up until that point.
Drawing direct inspiration from Taiwanese aesthetics, this publication has a more gritty urban feel and leans more towards illustrative. The book itself was constructed using low-fidelity materials sourced directly from a local family-run store in my neighborhood just around the corner of Wellcome.
In retrospective, this project was incredibly fun and meaningful for me to make and helped me gain some sort of clarity in reforecasting my intent on what’s important and valuable.
