One week in Berlin.

This morning, the warmest sunlight since winter arrived greeted me, yet I felt an unexpected wave of unease rush over me: a strong, suffocating boredom that sank me into melancholy. After a week of excitement, of everything feeling fresh and fueling my passion to explore, the fatigue of traveling had climbed up my spine. I started feeling irritated by the place I was staying, and the absence of small, familiar comforts lodged itself into my head like a splinter. The exhaustion of wanting to be somewhere else, somewhere I could relax, somewhere my body already belonged, grew heavier. It’s not that easy to rewrite the memory of a place. And now, strangely, I started to miss the Netherlands.

But I recognize this feeling. This boredom, this unsettled state that travel brings me. It makes me eloquent. It’s like a pressure that needs to be released, a restlessness that turns into an urge to write. This is good. I haven’t been able to write much over the past year, except for the weeks I spent doing fieldwork in Dexing for my graduation project. That was a similar situation, though weighed down by the expectation of production. Writing was a way to clear my mind, to push my brain into processing the overflow of thoughts after long, intense working days, to avoid sinking into the sluggish anxiety of fatigue.

This trip to Berlin was impulsive. I’ve been struggling, completely lost in the mess of post-graduation life—ups and downs, shattered expectations, joblessness, the uncertainty of my housing situation, the visa application limbo, the endless frustration of not knowing how to continue in art. Trial and error. Churning out open-call applications, waiting, hearing nothing back, piling up anxieties. And in sheer desperation to break out of this suffocating cycle, to escape the bleakness of my life and the equally bleak weather in the Netherlands, I paid for this residency. I thought I could get funding, but I lost it. And when the trip approached, I have never felt so cursed—my train got canceled, there was a public transportation strike the day I arrived, I had to turn down a shooting job because of my leave, and on top of everything, I couldn’t find my next housing. But still, I had already paid. So I had to go.

It’s my first time doing an artist residency. I had no idea what to expect. I proposed experimenting with some free writing—something that wouldn’t even help build my portfolio, even though I am in urgent need of new work to fill my barren portfolio, to make my practice seem more continuous and professional, so that curators or open calls might actually pick me, so that I can finally land some exhibitions, so that I can secure my artist visa in the upcoming year. And I carried all of this with me to Berlin, with nothing in my head.

It brings me to reflect on the meaning of traveling. I’ve realized that since moving to the Netherlands, the way I travel has shifted. It’s less like being a tourist and more like doing a residency.

One reason, of course, is that my budget is basically non-existent. I can’t afford the usual holiday sightseeing, the kind of travel that’s structured around hotels, landmarks, and overpriced meals. But my luxury is that I always find people I connect with in different places, and sometimes, there’s even a purpose—making work, exploring ideas. This means I tend to stay longer, usually one to two weeks, and instead of hotels, I stay at someone’s apartment. Most of the time, I travel alone, but I end up staying with people I know or have some kind of connection to. In a way, I get the freedom of traveling solo, but also a deeper connection to the place through those who live there.

This puts me in a fleeting, in-between state—moving alone, yet instantly tied to a place through someone. I find that quite interesting. Visiting a place is also about visiting people.

Just as the city is a gift to me, I’ve encountered many impressive works about traveling while in Berlin. I’ve started reading Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, a long, dense book that has become my way of passing time in this no-Wi-Fi existence. I also visited Sam Youkilis’ exhibition Under the Sun at C/O Berlin and Nan Goldin’s solo exhibition This Will Not End Well at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Somehow, all of these feel connected—the sharp, sometimes cynical observations from Lévi-Strauss (though I have to admit, some of his opinions seems outdated and biased today), yet his reflections on travel as entangled with colonization’s scars on societies and ecology remain deeply important; the sun-drenched, warm, and present-tense phone videos from Youkilis, which brought me moments of lightness in the coldest days of Berlin, making me feel the shared, weightless joy of holiday movement; and then, submerging myself in the raw, intimate, and emotional images of Goldin from the '80s.

All about travel—travel from coloniality, travel as leisure, travel in memories.

I had always wanted to see Nan Goldin’s work, ever since my teacher once told me that my series Nightsky, Tails, and Livingrooms reminded him of her slides. That was a project I did in my third year at KABK, where I visited people living far from home, photographing their pets in dimly lit living rooms at night, using my 28mm Ricoh compact camera with flash on. But unlike Goldin, I always found it difficult to take portraits of people. Intimacy with people has always felt hard for me. I could never imagine living a life so fully surrounded by such extraordinary individuals.

The exhibition was a vast retrospective, spanning 50 years of Goldin’s work—six slideshow and video installations packed with images, emotions, and fragments of a life. The energy in her work is so immediate, so raw, almost too much to take in at once. The people in her snapshots were around my age, many of whom have since become well-known in the art world. Seeing them as they once were hanging out in cafés and underground clubs felt strangely personal, as if I were looking into a past-present I had never lived but could somehow recognize.

But the exhibition space was crowded, the air thick and stale. Soon I felt lightheaded, short of breath. The sheer volume of images became overwhelming. And then, unsettlingly, I started to notice repetitions of certain images appearing in multiple installations. I couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that something was being shown to me over and over, looping endlessly within the dimly lit rooms.

I walked out of the exhibition feeling like I had just stepped off a 12-hour nonstop flight. The same disorienting fatigue I get every time I travel between China and Europe.