Exhibition | The 11th Taishin Arts Award Exhibition
Date | 2013/04/27-06/23
Venue | 台北當代藝術館 MOCA Taipei
Art as Environment—A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek is an artistic and social project that is organized by the artist, Mali Wu, in collaboration with the Bamboo Curtain Studio. Prior to this project, Mali Wu curated The Floating World: Tracing the Tamsui River (2006), An Environmental Art Action along the Tropic of Cancer (2006 to 2007), Taipei will still be a Lake Tomorrow (2008), and other environmental art actions. In addition to its efforts in integrating global and local wisdom, the Bamboo Curtain Studio, founded in 1993 and re-organized in 2005, aims to break through the status quo and make a difference by virtue of artistic actions. It hopes to become a platform for environmental sustainability on which dialogues, experiments and actions can take place.
Art as Environment—A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek is also a new form of practicing ideals of public art. The project includes five action plans, namely, "Breakfast Meetings at the Plum Tree Creek," "the Shape of the Village—Meandering Museum," "the River in Front of the Gates of the School," "Local Green Life—An Affair with Plants," and "Communal Theater." The core concept of the project is the element of water. Through tracing the creek, holding breakfast meetings and other out-reaching actions, the project aims to raise the environmental awareness among the residents in the community, evoking in them a sense of local attachment and regional solidarity.
From January, 2011 to July, 2012, the curator and the team of the Bamboo Curtain Studio closely collaborated with each other in terms of connecting residents around the upper, middle and the lower parts of the creek, working with local schools and universities, and conversing with residents in the community and the local government. Thus, this project transformed the improvement of environmental issues into a new kind of landscape art. In the process of this cultural action, art was utilized to agitate and raise environmental awareness among the residents, to create a relationship between people and land as well as to generate local culture and knowledge. Accordingly, this artistic, creative action integrated issues of artistic intervention, cultural action, interdisciplinary dialogues and research, eco-friendly cities, the power of imagination and community renewal. Through the idyllic envisioning and describing of a communal environment, the cultural action at the Plum Tree Creek set out to explore the possibility of creating an eco-friendly city in the future.