“Big Vases and the Exotic Landscape”, 2019
Bamboo Splits, fiber paper, Marine litters, banana peels
Presented at Live Forever Foundation, Taichung, Taiwan

What defines a “landscape”? For migrant workers living and working in a foreign land, a landscape is often mobile, fragmented, and a projection of their aspirations for a future life.

My creative practice has long focused on the living conditions of transnational migrant workers. Since 2018, I have visited various parks throughout Taipei where migrant communities gather, building deep connections through shared food, dialogue, and beach cleanup activities. These interactive experiences have allowed me to interweave my research into material culture with the personal life narratives of these individuals.

In 2019, I joined a beach cleanup project organized by the Indonesian migrant worker group “Universal Volunteer,” collecting various types of marine debris along Taiwan’s north coast. During this process, I invited the workers to draw their hometowns from memory. For them, a landscape is not a fixed perspective; it is a dynamic image that shifts along their trajectories of labor and life. Using this sea-washed waste—itself a metaphor for transnational flow—as my medium, I reassembled the nostalgic vistas of their homelands as described in their drawings.

The work Big Vases and the Exotic Landscapes extends the tradition of classical porcelain as a vessel for cultural transmission and exotic imagination. Within the structural installation of a giant vase, I have embedded fragments of landscapes constructed from marine debris. The vase is no longer a static ornament; it carries the workers’ nostalgia for their roots, their yearnings for the future, and a self-identity that is constantly being reshaped through movement. This is not only an experiment in material reconstruction but also a profound inquiry into the connection between life and land within the context of contemporary globalization.