Once a promise of freedom and boundless possibility, “the sky’s the limit” now rings with a different weight. Now that the skies have grown heavy, it is no longer an open space but a charged terrain shaped by surveillance, algorithmic systems, geopolitical tension, and global capital. What once symbolized movement and aspiration now reveals hidden architectures of control.

This exhibition reframes the once-hopeful slogan on its head: “The limit’s the skies.” Rather than a realm of boundless possibility, the skies have become a site of contradiction. Beneath the rhetoric of freedom and globalization lie conflicting realities, including the algorithmic governance, the ambivalence of migration and belonging, the commodification of travel, and the extractive infrastructures that sustain global circulation. These forces, acting together like turbulence, disturb our perception of the world and expose fissures in the ways we are conditioned to look. As emotion, memory, and the body are swept up in these accelerated conditions, turbulence comes to mean more than merely disruptions in air travel. It is the very condition of contemporary life: disoriented structures, blurred borders, and overstimulated senses that prompt us to rethink how we inhabit and connect with the world around us.

The airport, a familiar yet often overlooked site, serves as a conceptual anchor of the exhibition. It is a place of transit, surveillance, and delay, shaped by anticipation, regulation, and constant movement. As both a nexus of global connection and a site where the contradictions of our time are laid bare, the airport offers a lens through which we can resense and re-measure the world. In this exhibition, nine artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea engage with this condition of “turbulence” from different perspectives.

TSUI Hou-Lam begins with the fantasy of a“dream vacation” , exploring how tourism imagery constructs desires and frames the female bodies through a capitalist gaze; Natalie Lai Lai LO draws on the migratory rhythm of birds, reimagining flight not as a symbol of freedom, but as a cyclical movement between departure and landing. Her work maps the emotional turbulence of modern migrants, caught between attachment and the search for belonging.; HONG Jin-Hwon turns to satellites and cloud infrastructures suspended in the skies above, reflecting on how we are invisibly encoded by information technologies, and imagining a more decentralized flow of messages in this seemingly transparent sky; CHANG Ting-Chen explores the emotional manipulation embedded in global narratives and reveals the friction between mobility and regional difference; LO Yi-Chun traces the transformations of sugar, from fields to battlefields, from fuel to a symbol of desire, unfolding a circulation system woven by colonialism, trade, and war; LIN Yan-Xiang investigates the intersection between national infrastructure and local communities, tracing the conflicts hidden within the seemingly neutral construction of airports; Florence Yuk Yi LEE uses animation to record fleeting encounters between departure and arrival, portraying the emotional fluctuations during moving elsewhere; LI Bing-Ao assembles fragmented diary-like visuals that hover between familiarity and estrangement, crafting a dreamlike drift through everyday moments; Sean TSENG focuses on bodily sensation and spatial rhythms, building perceptual structures that reflect the instability and balance inherent in movement. Together, these works form a landscape of turbulence and rupture, opening passages for us to reimagine the world.

The Limit is the Turbulent Skies poses a deceptively simple question: as global mobility becomes our everyday condition, can we still look at “the same sky” from different points of view? When commodities, signals, images, and bodies move through the air along tangled paths, are we truly getting closer, or drifting further apart? Turbulence here becomes a way to rupture the familiar and sharpen our senses. Moments of instability invite us to pause and notice what often goes unseen: the subtle forces that shape how we move, how we feel, and how we connect.

In moments of turbulence, we may briefly lose our sense of direction. Yet it is in this very imbalance that we begin to recover our ability to feel. This journey, like a dream unfolding mid-flight, exists in a space between waking and sleep, between reality and imagination.