In his essay, Su-Liang Tseng explores the deep entanglement between psychological trauma, loneliness, and the act of artistic creation. Drawing on psychoanalytic perspectives and case studies of various artists, Tseng argues that emotional wounds, especially those rooted in early life experiences serve as both burdens and generative forces within artistic practice. He focuses on how trauma often manifests through persistent solitude, inward fixation, and altered social behavior, becoming a catalyst for deeply introspective and expressive work.

Tseng writes that "wound and loneliness are catalysts for art creation" (Tseng, 2004, p. 51), a phrase that is especially meaningful when considered in the context of my practice-based research. My work engages with the legacy of colonial violence in Taiwan, using Phalaenopsis orchids as a symbol of both historical trauma and ecological resilience. Like the psychological trauma that Tseng describes, colonial history is often repressed, internalized, and indirectly expressed. My process of engraving, cutting, and sensing orchids parallels the psychological mechanisms Tseng identifies: internal suffering made material through symbolic gestures.

In particular, Tseng's notion of "fixation" (p. 48) a recurring return to the source of pain resonates with my exploration of archival botanical records and colonial classification systems. The repeated visual reproduction and digital measurement of orchid life mirrors a kind of obsessive return to the site of epistemological violence, wherein the plant becomes both subject and witness.

Moreover, Tseng references Nietzsche’s concept of radical solitude as a space of creative transformation (p. 48). This links to my ongoing experimentation with sensor-based technologies, which allow the orchid to emit sound and signal its presence in a space where it was historically silenced. Just as Tseng suggests that artists learn to cultivate and grow from their isolation, my practice reclaims scientific and botanical data not as clinical facts, but as poetic expressions of historical memory and ecological interconnectedness.

Tseng’s work ultimately informs a key methodological and emotional dimension of my project: that the archive of colonial trauma, like the inner archive of personal pain, must be navigated not only through critique but also through care, sensitivity, and creative translation. By understanding artistic practice as a kind of psycho-emotional mapping, I can approach the orchid as more than a motif that becomes a medium through which Taiwan’s complicated histories are refracted, remembered, and potentially reimagined.