Ocean Encountering River: Aquatic Aesthetics of an Island

2022 CREATORS project, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB). In collaboration with artist Tzuan Wu, Yuping Guo, Chenchen Yu, and Ilmari Koria

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The curatorial project, launched by I-Yi Hsieh. experimentally engages with the aquatic  aesthetics of the Taipei basin - with a focus on the north part of the Tamsui river. This area is abundant with wetlands engulfed by annual deluge in the summer. Major streams of the basin crisscross each other around the Lion Head junction, the narrowest juncture of Tamsui river, where sea water and clear water meet alongside the three-river confluence.  

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Through the six months, the anthropologist and artists conducted art fieldwork alongside the Tamsui river in Taipei, we explored the deep time of wetness in Taipei basin through historical images in the early 17th century. inside out of our bodies, and collected archival maps, photographs, and literary writings of the aquatic Taipei since the 17th century. We tried to consider the "deep time" of Taipei Basin alongside the myths and tales associated with the Great Taipei Earthquake rumored to have had taken place in the early 17th century. Many have  even attributed this said-to-be-7-degree earthquake as the origin of the basin Taipei shapes into, as much as the notorious humidity surrounding creeks, annual floods, and wetlands all around.  

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The north side of the Tamsui river has always been a site of contention for river engineering. The annual deluge around the junction where the Keelung river, Tamsui river, and Xindian river meets at the tip of the Shezi island has been a politically sensitive issue for the many settler colonial regimes that reign this island since the 17th century. To capture the deep time marked in and flows alongside the rivers, we explored art forms that encapsulate forms of life in the aftermath of a violent event of engineered river explosion of the Lion Head junction in the 1964, suggested by the US Advisory Team to Taiwan in the Cold War era. The archival and art fieldwork at this junction led to collaboration with the Finnish artist/scholar Imari Kori in hydrophone recordings along the Tamsui river, particularly at that exact spot where the 1964 explosion, meant to widen the junction for flood prevention yet induced more deluge the next year and later forced a whole village south of the junction to be evicted from their salted rice farm.    

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Through experimental film on a half-human and half-clam creature, Tzuan Wu explored the interplay of sound and aquatic animated imaginaries in this island. Chenchen Yu took this opportunity to experiment on a unique shape of sculpture that combines wood, human body, environmental dampness, and still-damp clay - which allows the sculpture to slowly melt into a pool of mud in the event of rain outdoor. Yuping Guo set up a distilling mechanism and played with outdoor pottery bakery by utilizing Taiwanese aboriginal methods. Together they open up possibilities for us to feel the world of wetness inside-out, articulating our relationship with the myriad form of liquid and damp inside and surrounding us in the Taipei basin. The artists experimented on the phenomenological materialization of bodies of water in the often ineffable forms.   

 

For more Chinese articles about the project, and the artists' work, can be found here and here.