New York Travel Program is a group exhibition presenting work of the seven young artists Li Meng-chieh, Li Cheng-liang, Yu Chengta, Luo Jr-shin, Liao Zenping, Chen Liang-hsuan, and Yeh Chen-Yu. The exhibition is named for a privately funded residency program established by Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) alumni who currently reside in New York. Starting in 2007, the program has provided opportunities for selected students enrolled at TNUA to travel to New York City for one month. Although the exhibition can be seen as the result of the students attending the residency program, it must also be emphasized that the purpose of the program is to challenge and expand the horizons of the participating students such that they become independent thinkers. Furthermore, while the exhibition did include a curatorial mechanism for the purpose of creating a statement related to the residency, its main intention was of course to present the work of these artists. The works included here do possess a certain commonality, however, and that is the experience of displacement that these students felt living in a foreign city. This city, as a site of western modernity, is both an area of concentrated activity and heterogeneity, and composed of many people who arrive from other regions. In these works by young artists, we can especially see this experience of displacement being used to emphasize a certain kind of dual process: as people continue to make more contact with other cultures and regions, they necessarily regain some insight into themselves and their homes. By Jian Tzu-chieh