Weavers with the River I
2018
inspired by The Plum Tree Creek(樹梅坑溪), New Taipei City, Taiwan
The whole project has its root in an exploration of a question: How should city dwellers regard a modernized river?
The Plum Tree Creek isn’t all that long. It is like many other rivers in Taiwan. And they face similar fates, that when its drainage basin is developed or urbanized, it is a mere ditch in the eyes of people.
The reason why I chose the weaving as the media was that it’s always from the bottom up. That’s very much like the process we take to get acquainted with the river, walking upstream from downstream.
During this period, I hung the map that I had woven in Ground Zero studio on the window with a view of the Plum Tree Creek. I wanted for the work to function also as a window to make people see this river again. Then I invited local people to weave a local map of their own. In this process, they could see the Plum Tree Creek in their memory, and think about what sort of position they should take on this river.
