Client: Mr.Wong

Location: Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China

Completion date: 2016

Artwork budget: $160,000

Project Team

Artist

Lien-wu Chen

Chains Interior

Client

Private Residence

Overview

Having had designed many homes and built beautiful living spaces for our clients over the past, this question continues to linger in our mind: what is “home”, exactly?

Goals

When we met with our new clients, we learned that, as a couple, they were together for two decades before finally deciding to walk down the aisle and embark on the journey of marriage. It was this house that prompted the decision. During many meetings of discussion and listening, we had also observed the way they interacted with each other, finding their story fascinating, yet not sharing the tired rosy ending like those in a fairy tale. So is the home they have built together really a nest or a cage?

Process

Oscar Wilde’s story The Nightingale and the Rose served as an inspiration for our project. In the story , the author wrote, “Life is very dear to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?” In the end, home is a kind of passion where everything could be sacrificed for the love of one’s life, and that passion lifts us up to overcome all odds. We are willing, no matter if that love is a nest or cage.

Additional Information

The living room in the project is, thus, fabricated by crisscrosses of lighting rods and wood sticks to represent the mesh of different materials in a bird nest. However, the mesh extends from the ceiling down to the wall, resembling a birdcage. Here it serves dual purposes, proposing two possibilities to interpret the home.