TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Sebastian Moldovan does not trust appearances, especially when they look solid.

“I want your eyes to believe one thing,” the Romanian artist says, leaning back and smiling, “and the second you touch it, you realize you were lied to. Gently, but completely.”

Born in Romania in 1982, Sebastian has spent more than two decades moving restlessly across mediums, from traditional painting to video, performance, and large-scale, site-specific installations, driven by what he describes as a refusal to stay comfortable or still.

“I started in a very traditional school,” he says. “Nude drawing, color theory, all of that. But I realized pretty fast it was like going 30 or 40 years backward. I needed freedom.”

He stopped painting entirely before finishing his studies. Drawing remained, but only as a tool. “Drawing became engineering,” Sebastian says. “It was how I dissected future works before they existed.”

By the early 2000s, he had shifted into video, just as the medium was gaining traction at international biennials.

“It was new. Everybody was doing video,” he says. “I worked almost only in black and white. I edited everything myself. I did not care about quality; I cared about involvement. Video was something I could think through and talk through.”

One of his earliest and most notable works came from a performance intervention in Paris. Sebastian walked through parts of the city undergoing demolition and redevelopment, carrying a handmade road sign reading “Exit Paris,” with the city’s name slashed out in red.

“I never wanted to perform for people,” he says. “I wanted to do it for the camera. But then the video just traveled.” The work resonated in Romania, where performance and video art developed under political restrictions in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Some artists were under house arrest,” Sebastian says. “They couldn’t really do anything except use their bodies. That history stays with you.”

As video began to feel restrictive, “too much time, too much editing,” Sebastian drifted again toward interventions that evolved into site-specific installations shown in museums and large industrial spaces in Romania and abroad.

Long-term collaborations with curators like Anca Mihulet-Kim, one of the three co-curators of the inaugural Taichung Art Museum, played a key role in shaping that evolution.

“Anca likes to build long relationships with artists,” Sebastian says of his frequent collaborator and the individual responsible for bringing him to Taichung. “Not directing the work, just recognizing where it already wants to go.”

Text entered his practice quietly. Sebastian produces books and installation booklets, though he is quick to downplay their literary ambition. “There’s not a lot of text in this,” he says. “A book is a long commitment. Halfway through, I’m already bored.”

Instead, the books are filled with drawings, images, and short, aphoristic phrases. “They’re not there to explain everything,” he says. “They just open a door.”

Many of those doors lead back to childhood memories: summers spent with his grandparents in rural villages, learning through animals, weather, and materials. “That’s my foundation,” Sebastian says. “Understanding reality through nature, not theory.”

That tension between perception and reality defines much of his recent work, including a recurring series of stone-like objects made entirely of paper.

“They look like rocks,” he says. “They feel like rocks until you put them in water. Then they disappear.” The illusion is intentional.

“I want the rocks to be real until the moment they’re not,” he says. “That second of doubt, that is the work.”

At this year's Art Encounters Biennial in Romania, Sebastian constructed a fictional narrative of apocalypse survivors hiding from the outside world after a total system collapse. In the story, the group rejects history, logic, and reproduction, pulping books into “paper stones.”

“It’s a denial of knowledge,” Sebastian says. “A denial of life. It’s absurd, but it’s supposed to be.” Asked whether the work is meant as a social or political critique, Sebastian shrugs.

“Art has always lied,” he says. “Paintings made kings look beautiful. That was propaganda. Political art tried to expose capitalism, power, and injustice. Now we have design pretending to be harmless. It’s all mixed together.”

He pauses, and with a shrug, he says, “I am not trying to teach people.” “I just want them to notice when their certainty slips.”

After more than 20 years working exclusively as an artist, Sebastian says the practice has shaped not only his career but also his way of being.

“Your brain sets like concrete,” he says. “Sometimes you do not know how you will feed yourself or pay rent. It’s not glamorous.”

He laughs, then softens. “But slowing down, watching shadows move across a table—that’s also part of it. That’s part of being human.”

Like his paper rocks, Sebastian’s work invites viewers to look twice—and accept that what feels solid may not be.