"History is like a bus's rearview mirror. A bus without a rearview mirror can still move forward, but it is dangerous."
The "Rearview Mirror Project" of Penghu Refugee Camps is an initiative to "write history through images." The founder and chairman of the association, as well as documentary director Asio Liu, once served as a professional bus driver for nearly five years. Drawing from his firsthand labor experiences, he offers this unique historical insight.
The Penghu Refugee Camps project originated from Asio Liu's unknown dreams between 1995 and 2003 and developed into the "Penghu Refugee Camps Trilogy" documentary project and VR works from 2013 to 2023. The project has successively received support from the National Culture Foundation (2013-2018), the New Zealand Doc Edge Rough Cuts Workshop (2021), and the Venice Production Bridge (2022), receiving recognition from both domestic and international reviewers.
After ten years of hard work and challenges, the stories of 51 refugee boats from the now-demolished Penghu refugee camps have become clearer. Two works — the VR project "Somewhere Unknown in Indochina VR" (2024) and the documentary film "Strangers and Their Babies" (2025) — have been completed. The exhibition "Vittuality Embodied: Virtuality Embodied: The Virtual/Real Experience of Once-Existent Vietnamese Refugee Camps in Taiwan" is now showing or will soon be shown at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and TheCube Project Space in Taipei (2025/7/19–9/7, 9/20–11/9). The documentary film "A Place of Exceptions" is still in post-production.
We sincerely ask for your support in this final stage of the Rearview Mirror Project. When thinking about Taiwan’s identity, the story of the Penghu Refugee Camps is a critical piece that has long been missing from the Asia-Pacific picture.
Our vision is to create an "ROW (Refugees Of War) VR Museum" in Taiwan, virtually reconstructing it based on the historical experiences of the Penghu Refugee Camps.
