Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Hsu, Su-Chen and Lu, Chien-Ming’s hut-building  has rocked the urban substructure. The Sa’owac Village has penetrated the cracks of city-dwellers lives, and it has done so by employing a strategy of a counter-invasion that demands the right to exist. Hsu and Lu have used discarded construction materials to simulate the reconstruction of the dwellings of an aboriginal village, and in doing so they declared legal habitation as a basic right. The exhibition itself brings together the tribe’s attitude towards life, cultural memory and modes of production, using poverty as a means of resistance to all-powerful capitalism and transcending urban showiness and duplicity. Social unbalance provides us with an opportunity for thought and reflection: How does art depend on its social environment? How do artists define themselves within social movements? Should art actions be merely symbolic, or should they be full-fledged protest?   ( Committee member/ Chen, Guan-Jun)

Jury’s Comments for the Visual Arts Award

The project brings up abundant issues for the art community in Taiwan. As artists, Hsu and Lu continue to get involved in the society and have combed every aspects of their involvement in forms of art. This form, definitely, explores a new definition to the roles Taiwan artists play.

The whole creation plan and the activity of theirs, however, is very ambitious, and they want to construct a new system of “taste” that is different form the mainstream middle-class taste in Taiwan; this new system can be integrated with Amis people and realize their ambition in the actual environment. While cooperating with an indigenous village, Hsu and Lu keep fulfilling their duties as artists. They have also established a model for Han people to be able to participate in indigenous society with the roles they are playing in Amis traditional culture as artists.

From an artistic point of view, they created a quite unique aspect of space in their cottage-like work. It will stimulate the new possibility of the installation in the field of contemporary art. It explores questions as habitat, way of living, architecture and actual world for people in a very human and cultured ways. It supposes a wide knowledge in different fields of culture.

The exhibition also clarifies a long-discussed issue of Taiwan art, which is “Local vs. International”. This “local” exhibition can actually be presented in the current international artistic context naturally. Therefore, a new possibility for Taiwan art’s international imagination is emerged.

Artwork Introduction

Hsu, Su-Chen and Lu, Chien-Ming’s Plant-Matter NeoEden: Born in a Vegetable Patch & Material World in the Amis Tribe of Riverbank was exhibited at Shin Leh Yuan Art Space, April 18 to May 3, 2009 and at Sin Pin Pier Absolutely Art Space, December 12, 2009 to January 3, 2010.

Hsu, Su-Chen writes: “The work does not try to recapture the villagers' recent protest movement. Instead, it portrays the characteristics of the long-neglected villagers in the protest movement, and restores the true appearance of their culture and lifestyle. … The work's portrayal of a riverside vegetable patch and home-building activities underscores the aboriginal philosophy of closeness to the land, and also highlights the urban aborigines' habitual efforts to build a home in harmony with the topography and environment. The aborigines further exemplified contemporary urban aboriginal culture by using waste urban building materials to construct their dwellings. The work additionally depicts the efforts to legitimize the aborigines' wish to live in peace at the urban margin.

The people from the Sa'owac tribe build farming huts everywhere we give an exhibition. They use second-hand recycled urban building materials such as pallets, scrap wood, and plywood to construct these dwelling places…The photographic installation includes the photographs that we donated to their tribe from last October until today (before and after they were forced to move). Their life stories are also related in Chinese and the Amis language, and there is a tribe protest karaoke with Amis folk songs expressing their transition from their homeland to the city. This is like a diary of the tribe's life after the people moved. The ongoing collection and editing of folk songs is also creating a slowly unfolding documentary of singing and images. Rather than emphasizing their low social standing and economic disadvantages, this exhibition focuses on the strong Amis culture and sustainable lifestyle of the people of Sa'owac.”

About the Artist

About Hsu, Su-Chen

Hsu, Su-Chen has worked as a medical technologist, an artist and curator. Besides participating in numerous art exhibitions and festivals, she has also published many academic papers, and has played active roles in several interdisciplinary and international collaborative projects.

About Lu, Chien-Ming

Lu, Chien-Ming studied architecture. He uses “social realization” as his primary method to establish the theory and practice of future societal adaptation via collective learning in the form of social movements. He is currently adviser to the Sa’owac Tribe, Dahan River Tribe Self-Determination Association which was established when several of the urban Amis villages along the Dahan River were demolished.