The Box Was Big Enough to Lie Down In

The poster for The Unmoored, now open at NYCU in Hsinchu, shows Gao Jun-honn pulling an arrow-shaped wooden box along a street. The exhibition brings together twelve artists and more than twenty works made between 1968 and 2026.

He called it 地心號. It was roughly the length of his body and mounted on wheels. Inside were a sleeping bag, a shovel, a camping stove, a silver-print self-portrait and several small works. A board carried the sentence 「再會，我已從此離開。」—farewell, I have left this place.

Gao has described the box as both a personal museum and a coffin. It contained the things he had chosen to keep, but 地心號 also had to move through streets and stations. In Gao's black-and-white photograph, the pointed box follows behind him at the end of a rope. Its wheels are small. He leans forward as he pulls.

The route began in Banqiao. Gao brought 地心號 to Shulin Station and boarded a night train, planning to film in Tainan before continuing south to Diana's Pool in Sandimen. A hand-drawn map from the work plots that route beside the same departure sentence carried on the box.

The trip did not follow the map. Gao's wallet was stolen on the train. With little money left, he moved and filmed through Tainan and Changhua instead of reaching Sandimen. The change is part of the work's record: not a symbolic detour added later, but the practical consequence of losing the money required to continue.

A color contact sheet places the action among other people. Gao stands in roads and station spaces, holds signs and hands out printed material. The box moves through the same public infrastructure as passengers, vehicles and luggage. Gao later recalled telling railway staff that it was for an advertisement because explaining the action as art was difficult.

In 2020, Gao returned to Farewell! Departing by Now. A later photograph shows a blue version of the vehicle among traffic. In an interview that year, he said that remaking the work meant including both the elapsed time and the changes in his body. The current NYCU exhibition labels the work 1998/2020.

At Ho Ran Library, the work enters an exhibition about leaving home, geographical attachment and the remaking of a self. Gao's account begins with what he built and packed, and with the money needed to travel. A stolen wallet changed the route. The box that Gao pulled through streets and stations now sits inside a campus arts space.