Ship of Fools” is a literature term derived from Sebastian Brant’s work
Ship of Fool” published in 1949, which depicts a wandering vessel with 111 fools. Each fool represents a kind of secular character or social problem. The allegory soon became popular at the time. However, the ship of fools did exist. In 15th century, the deranged passenger on the ship of fools wandered from one city to another, leading a carefree life style. The cities expelled them, so they were allowed to wander in sparsely populated villages, especially in Germany. The water and sailing indicated the most unknown destiny, thousand-branched rivers and endless oceans became the most liberal and open-minded place. Taipei Main Station, to many people, is never a place to linger, it’s a node during moving. However, in an aspect that we can’t see (or we don’t want to see), it has become a gathering spot for more than two hundred wandering people who has been expelled by social system voluntarily or reluctantly. Including of unemployed workers, the disabled, or those who have been considered mentally ill. Taipei main station has become the ship of fools, bringing those who are expelled by the society. Decades passed, they’ve become a structured group, with division of works, with hierarchy, with communities, even with their own history. They co-exist with civilization of different eras in a variety of form. Since 2014, I started to get in touch with the group that has been expelled from society, the group we called homeless people. I initiated many related projects in 2014, however, no one in the end really finished. The reality was out of my imagination. At the beginning I followed a homeless people who lived around my neighborhood, and wrote down my observation everyday, trying to map out the distribution of homeless people in the city. I participated in NGO
Homeless Taipei”, in order to understand the supportive actions taken by those NGOs. I sketched the portraits of homeless people and collecting their personal stories. In the end of this process, I was led to the massive and complicated public space of Taipei Main Station. With the time I stayed in this territory, the feature of this space gradually changed. I grew my own network in this micro society. Little by little, I realized that it was not the serious patient expelled by society who was to take this ship of fools. It was the division of ideology through some kind of binary value judge. Or to be frank, both you and me are the passenger of the ship of fools.