Ma Chenyao

This work employs a Fresnel lens to explore the process of “cultural displacement” experienced by a folding screen from the Toyotomi Hideyoshi era as it traveled across regions. The lens enlarges and distorts the image, placing the viewer in the position of a gazing subject, yet at the same time allows the surrounding environment to seep in, fragmenting the scene. Moving between clarity and blur, the viewer reenacts how the screen—once structured by the logic of Chinese-style scattered perspective—was forcibly relocated into the Austrian palace, where its original cultural experience was reconstructed as an illusion of the Other.