Sandwich Biscuit FG
2025-Ongoing

Sandwich Biscuit: First Gundam (FG) uses Japan's Mobile Suit Gundam franchise as a case study of cultural infiltration. Gundam is not a niche subculture in East Asia. Across Taiwan, Thailand, and beyond, its imagery saturates street-level commerce: model kits in convenience stores, branded clothing in department stores, life-size statues outside shopping malls. For a generation that grew up in Taiwan during peak Japanese cultural influx, this franchise was not consumed as foreign. It was absorbed as ambient reality, indistinguishable from local life. This is the condition FG examines.
               The 14 existing works come from a single photogrammetric model that force-merges street photographs from Taipei, London and Bangkok. Compressing distinct cultural geographies into one unified form at the first stage is structurally equivalent to brute-force colonial integration. The annotations labelling each region's origin are ironic, naming diversity after flattening it.
               The work is built through iterative cycles. Photographs pass through a repeating sequence of processes, and three distinct print methods structure the project, each enacting a different mode of power on the image.
               Xerography strips colour, data, and original format, compressing heterogeneous images into a standardised black-and-white register. This is formatting: structural, institutional, invisible power, operating beneath notice while fundamentally reshaping what passes through it.
               Handwritten inscriptions impose a classification system onto each xerographic print: topic, location, year, date, time, sequence. This is overwriting: visible, personal, explicit power. Unlike the xerox's anonymity, inscriptions announce themselves. The codes are written only on paper, never digitally. Corrections are accepted and preserved.
               The inscribed prints are then scanned and processed through photogrammetry, a technology rooted in military intelligence and cartographic surveying. The software evaluates photographs against algorithmic standards of coherence, eliminates those that do not conform, and merges the remainder into a unified 3D reconstruction. I reposition a virtual camera within the model and re-photograph it. The digital output is a distinct print method in its own right: technology's own power. I set the parameters, but the reconstruction, selection, and rendering are performed by the algorithm without my hand.
               The output re-enters the cycle from the beginning. As iterations accumulate, the gap between the handwritten codes and the actual image content widens. Labels persist while the thing they describe changes beyond recognition. This growing divergence is not a flaw but the point: it performs how meaning drifts when repeatedly mediated by external systems.
               Photogravure inscribes the handwritten codes into metal plates through an etching process. This is inscribing: labour-intensive, irreversible power that preserves the codes as permanent evidence. The handwriting is reproduced via plate rather than written directly onto the final print. My personal intervention is itself mediated by technology, paralleling how identity is mediated by systems.
               Collected materials, including assembly manuals, magazines, and licensed merchandise, also enter the iteration cycle. These objects are ontologically distinct from street photography: they are not my act of looking at cultural symbols but the infiltration vectors themselves, the objects that moved from Japan into my everyday space. They undergo generational photocopying as their own iteration process, and function simultaneously as a standalone infiltration archive and as overlay material acting on FG images. Symbols of burning, fragmentation, and structural collapse appear throughout the series. None are staged. They emerge from iterative pressure and are preserved as evidence that sustained reshaping does not erase but transforms, and the residue of that transformation is what the work makes visible.