会場：路地と人（水道橋／東京）

会期：2024/11/07-11/11

Wuthering Heights 2024 (11 min 31 sec)

by naok fujimoto

This video installation marks my first attempt to explore my own personal memories and narrative through art.

For many years, I kept certain memories buried deep within me. But after a particular incident, I felt an overwhelming urge to share them with someone. The result is this piece—an intimate, layered work that weaves together my relationship with my mother and Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s haunting novel about a motherless daughter and her lost love.

Previously, I had curated exhibitions and film screenings on family themes, such as the Taiwanese documentary Small Talk (2017, dir. Huang Hui-chen), which depicts a mother-daughter relationship and is said to have influenced the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan.Yet when it came to addressing my own story—especially one involving my mother—I found myself hesitating, resisting.

Wuthering Heights is widely regarded as a dramatic tale of passion and tragic romance. But it can also be seen as a narrative shaped by maternal absence. Both Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter Cathy Linton lose their mothers in childhood. Emily Brontë herself lost her mother at the age of three. Seen through this lens, I began to feel a strange affinity with the novel—a resonance I hadn't expected, as if its feverish emotions were somehow not so distant from my own.

When speaking about my mother to others, I refer to her as Ha-Ha. But I haven’t called her by any conventional maternal term in person since around the time I entered elementary school. I stopped saying “Mama”—perhaps a quiet form of resistance, or simply what felt natural.Some friends have commented, “It’s like you’re talking to a close friend,” when they hear me use her first name or nickname. And maybe, in a way, they’re right.

In the summer of 2024, my mother’s childhood home was torn down.Built by my grandparents, that house had long been tied to memories of my years as a young carer. But it wasn’t just a site of hardship—it held stories too complex to be reduced to negativity. In the spice-scented parlor, filled with the aroma of coffee and cigarettes, I would quietly gaze at my grandfather’s collection of imported furniture and artworks. These moments were also my earliest encounters with art and design.

So to witness that house and its garden being dismantled before my eyes—reduced to rubble and skeletal beams—was a visceral experience. For my mother, who had spent far more time there than I had, it must have been a profound rupture.Perhaps it was even a turning point. Raised in a society still echoing Victorian-era patriarchy, where women were expected to endure in silence, my mother—like so many before her—had inherited that legacy of quiet survival. And now, she was facing its dissolution.

As I walked through the debris, acting as the unofficial “mourner” for the home in her place, I was struck by a strange sensation: the desolate scene beneath my feet recalled the moors of Haworth, where Wuthering Heights is set—a place I had once visited.“This is my own Wuthering Heights,” I found myself murmuring, and began filming. It became my way of mourning. But more than that, it was a moment when something long absent finally revealed itself—after all these years.

In that summer of 2024, for the first time, my mother and I became companions—sharing not only memory, but also emotion.We became comrades in remembrance.