Tropical collection is a series of wooden screens with Taiwan’s industrial landscape as its main theme. The installation, which consists of twelve vertically-held tatami screens, is the product of Lo Yi-Chun gathering and studying photos in historical archives. She studies the places where natural resources and raw materials had been the main export products since the Age of Exploration to map both Taiwan’s position in the system of globalization and its economy in natural and cultural landscapes.

Lo Yi-Chun obtained pictures from Japanese Geography – Taiwan, 0ne of the geographical series published by Tokyo Kaizosha between 1929 to 1931, and other historical photos depicting Taiwan’s agricultural landscape and crops that she found on the internet before digitally re-creating collages of scenic images that traveled through time and space. Twelve different images, including of Formosan cypress from Alishan, camphor from Sun Moon Lake, sika deer, pineapple fields, a banana farm, a tea farm, jade from Taroko Gorge, tobacco fields, sugar cane fields, salt mountains, wax apples and papayas, were juxtaposed, merged and extended. These images were later printed black and white on silk fabric in a fashion reminiscent of Chinese landscape paintings or the surreal landscape of tropical islands. Lo Yi-Chun framed her artworks manually, inserting this series of images into different sizes of screens, which were later installed on tatami with a variety of angles and directions. The final work is to be viewed, displayed and collected like a piece of landscape art hung at home.   

Each piece of landscape screen was designed into a geometric form by its exported ratio, which represented how landscape had been divided by different economical structures, and also obscurely revealed the link between empire and industry during the planting and producing process of economical crops.   

Artist｜Lo Yi Chun 
Presented at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
2016.09.12 – 2016.12.06

More Information: https://faam.city.fukuoka.lg.jp/en/residence/8843/