When I asked Ou to nominate a friend who "does not go to art exhibitions or talk about art" to participate in this project, he soon told me about Wang, who was his high school classmate. Ou described Wang as a very cool friend who writes poetry and is currently studying Taiwanese Literature. Initially, I was a little skeptical about whether Wang would be too "close to art," though he fully met the conditions I offered. After considering that the visual art circle and poetry circle are very separate in the Taiwanese context, which they work on their separate subjects and seldom overlap, I changed my mind. I have been looking forward to seeing what kind of energy Wang can bring to this interview from the perspective of a poetry creator. It would be valuable to learn how he can graft the insights he has cultivated from the poetry circle and examine art forms he is not familiar with. It would also be interesting to investigate how he can discard the thought of viewing visual art as "difficult to understand" and connect his interpretation to his understanding of Ou. As the middle person of the two, I am more than excited to explore their perspectives.

 

The artistic exchange between the two never happened, despite having collaborated in an art project during high school. It would be more accurate to call it a juxtaposition of the two's works instead of naming it a collaboration with true communication. At that time, Wang was interested in writing poems and posting them on the social media platform Instagram. Thus, he asked his friend Ou to help him draw illustrations for his texts. Nonetheless, this did not trigger them to discuss art in greater depth. Ou even told me that during the collaboration, he actually could not fully understand Wang's expressions. On the other hand, Wang expressed his viewpoint, "I often felt that what he drew and what I expressed were not the same. However, in fact, I did not see it as a problem. The discrepancy between the two has enabled the possibility of forming dialogues." What is most interesting about this collaboration is that they reached a tacit agreement of not going further on the art discussion afterward. Art conversation has never been truly opened up between them, and not to mention Ou sharing with Wang what he has been working on.

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In my conversations with Ou and Wang, I discovered that they have little interest in each other's art but enjoy sharing details about their personal lives. This disinterest may stem from the difficulty of understanding each other's art forms. Furthermore, Ou played the role of the "listener" in their high school group, adapting his response based on who he was interacting with, which gave him a "mysterious" image in Wang's eyes. However, despite seeing Ou's art for the first time, Wang was able to interpret it and connect with it on a deep level, and show his understanding to Ou's artistic struggles. This resonance is an unexpected outcome of this project, much like how Pilgrim, the centerpiece of this interview, triggered the participation out of expectation.