“Runaway from Home Club
─ Back Patting Machine”​
逃家俱樂部 之拍背機

Can you choose your family?

Family is the first social group we belong to, shaping our mental resilience and social skills from the very beginning. Yet, unlike friendships or professional networks, family is not something we can choose, even though it determines much of our life’s trajectory. It is a very unfair situation for me. I often reflect on this imbalance and search for ways to address it.

 

From my perspective, “distance” may be a crucial solution. The closer we are required to be, the more compromises we must make. Unfortunately, society rarely allows us the freedom to create healthy distance from our families. Cultural expectations, moral obligations, and responsibilities often restrict this possibility. 

 

This led me to imagine the idea of a “Run Away from Home Club”—not as an act of rebellion, but as a metaphor for carving out space to breathe, reflect, and grow independently. The challenge, then, is how we can situate ourselves in ways that are healthier, happier, and more centered: balancing closeness with autonomy, responsibility with self-care, and tradition with personal freedom.​​

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How about Run Away if no?

The Run Away from Home Club is a for‑profit organisation founded in 2050. It specialises in providing accommodation, entertainment, counselling, and discussion forums for individuals seeking temporary distance from their families or society. The club welcomes a diverse membership: adolescents struggling with troubled relationships with their mothers, adults wishing to leave marriages but uncertain how to proceed, parents feeling isolated as their children grow up and family functions diminish, and individuals seeking to escape societal expectations in order to live more authentically.

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The club offers extensive recreational and counselling services. Members typically stay for two months, during which they rest, reflect, and explore new ways of living. Afterwards, they either return home with renewed, healthier attitudes or establish new environments for themselves. Although the Escape Home Club is not inexpensive, its fees are slightly lower than those of language schools. For many, the opportunity to shift perspective, discover a happier way of life, and embark on a new chapter is well worth the cost—one of the key reasons for the organisation’s considerable popularity.

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In my creative work, I aim to address four negative emotions—anger, loneliness, avoidance, and endurance—through four conceptual machines: the Back‑Patting Machine, the Crying Machine, the Feeling Translation Machine, and the Fighting Machine. At present, I have only developed the Back‑Patting Machine, but it serves as the first step in exploring how technology and metaphor can help us process and transform difficult emotions.​

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Speculative Future

This work is set in the year 2050—a future imagined as a time of heightened mental struggles, where people search for new ways to cope. The project is not merely fiction; it is a speculative lens through which audiences can compare and reflect on the challenges of today’s world.

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The final form takes shape as a Run Away from Home Club website. Rather than offering direct explanations or instructions, the site uses questions and suggestive imagery to prompt visitors to recognize their own conditions and consider the possibility of escape. At the heart of the concept is self‑care. Instead of positioning the club as a superhero organisation that solves every problem, the work emphasizes the importance of perceiving one’s own precarious situation and calling for help when needed. This shift makes the project meaningful in the present, as it encourages autonomy and awareness.

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The artwork is produced in a mechanical manner. I created a Back‑Patting Machine—a chair equipped with a repetitive patting function—as an entry point for emotional expression. This approach is consistent with methods I have used across my series of works. The cold, regular, and repetitive qualities of the machines provide a rational, unemotional, and structured invitation, offering people a clear and accessible starting point for exploring their inner selves. Although the mechanical characteristics seem contradictory to the fluidity of emotions, they create a fictional yet realistic framework for facing and feeling.

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A path between real world and virtual world

As an applicant of the Rubber Hand Illusion, my intention in this work is to bridge the real and the virtual. Both the Back‑Patting Machine and the human body are recreated through 3D rendering and 3D scanning, producing twin versions of machine and self in the virtual world.

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The Rubber Hand Illusion was first introduced in Nature by American psychologists Botvinick and Cohen. In their experiment, participants viewed a lifelike rubber hand while their real hand was hidden. Both hands were stroked simultaneously with brushes, and after a short period, when the rubber hand was struck, participants instinctively withdrew their real hand. The synchronization of sight and touch convinced them that the rubber hand was their own.

This phenomenon has become central to virtual reality research, offering a profound connection between real and virtual experiences. It demonstrates a neurological and psychological pathway through which virtual experiences can feel authentic. Since the Enlightenment, humans have sought standardized processes for understanding and belief. Yet virtual reality raises a provocative question: does it redefine existence itself? From philosopher George Berkeley’s perspective—“To be is to be perceived”—virtual experiences can indeed be considered real.

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How deeply can virtual reality affect us when we provide avatars that mirror our physical selves? In today’s capitalist world, wealth inequality and intergenerational justice remain persistent problems, resistant to systemic solutions. Might virtual experiences offer an alternative path—one that raises awareness and provokes reflection—without the material costs of changing the real world? My work takes this indirect approach, focusing on triggering emotions and perceptions to spark awareness of these questions.​​

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