We held a portrait exhibition through which visitors could simulate the experience of coming face-to-face with people with mental health problems and helping in their recovery. Based on the photos taken, we created a life-size portrait panel of each person with an eye-tracking sensor installed inside. When a visitor came face-to-face with a portrait, stories of how the subject suffered as a result of lack of understanding of people around him/her would appear. As the visitor read the stories, the face of the person shown in the portrait changed, eventually smiling when the visitor reached the end. Then a story appeared explaining how being looked in the face and receiving the understanding of family and friends helped in the person’s recovery.

To create an atmosphere appropriate for a photo exhibition, we constructed a white-cube museum-like space. We designed five panels measuring 2m long by 1.5m wide in which to place life-size portraits of sufferers and installed a 4K display in the facial area of each portrait. When a visitor sits in front of each portrait, the eye-tracking sensor automatically locks on to the visitor’s line of sight. Then, four sets of random letters appear on the display. As the visitor faces the display, the letters gradually form readable sentences relating how the person suffered from the poor understanding of people around him/her. As the visitor reads the stories sentence by sentence, the face in the portrait becomes brighter and brighter, and finally smiles. At the end, the person tells how his/her recovery was helped by the understanding of his/her family and friends. We spent about nine months developing this program.

• During the period of the four-day exhibition, 1,056 visitors experienced the program, with a total of 1,969 plays for the five signage displays exhibited.

• The visitor questionnaire found that about 40% of the respondents have close acquaintances who suffer from mental disorders, and added positive comments like, “I did not know how I could help them but I have decided to contact them.”

• About 55% of respondents to the questionnaire reacted positively to the program, saying, for example, “I want to know more about the illnesses and those who experience them,” “I will try to look them in the face,” and “I want this exhibition to be held in other places.”

• Over 40 media outlets reported on this exhibition.