Post Ecolonialism Project

Post Ecolonialism Project first starts as an eco-action, and gradually evolves into an "action culturelle." The project aims to perform "bricolage," or "repair" the destructed nature by planting trees while re-contemplating on our relationship with nature during the process of "bricolage" as we "return the land to trees." The large number of newly planted endemic trees also reconstructed the landscape destructed by human beings. The project viewed the action of tree-planting as a metaphor, through which we could re-examine the genre of landscape painting. The core spirit of both center on the relationship between the subject and nature. In addition to displaying documentations of the tree-planting action, the exhibition also reviews a certain aspect of Taiwanese landscape (painting), and attempts to represent this genealogy through new artistic creations.
The exhibition explores and contemplates on Taiwanese landscape through five sections. For the first section, the curatorial team journeyed to different parts of the Xue Mountain Range, Central Mountain Range, and Ali Mountain Range to filmed three waterfalls and created a scroll-like video work afterwards. The video symbolizes the landscape painting that shows how Taiwanese people have viewed nature during the rule of Qing dynasty. The second section introduces botanic gardens established during the Japanese-ruled period and reproduced picture postcards, through which the section would explore how nature was perceived in a manner of "decontextualization" after modernity was introduced into Taiwan as well as the landscape painting of this period. In the third section, audience could see the landscape paintings of different types by various contemporary Taiwanese painters. The section reveals both the disparities between contemporary landscape paintings and those from the Japanese-ruled Taiwan, and the shift in the relationship between man and nature. On view in the fourth section is a remake of a segment from Hou Hsiao-Hsien's road film, demonstrating the landscape from another perspective and through a different medium. The fifth section displays an installation that embodies the landscape of Taiwanese forest. A video of the Taiwanese endemic plant, Taiwan Photinia, is placed in this landscape installation. This particular Taiwan Photinia has been transplanted in a garden in Normandy, France several decades ago. Through its representation, the section reexamines the problematic of "ecolonialism" in the context of globalization and responds to the cultural thinking of recontextualization in this eco action of "returning the land to trees."