Art intervenes in the environment
In 2011, curator Wu Mali arranged for the artists in residence to launch a Green Art Action series focusing on the nearby Plum Tree Creek.
According to BCS research and development director Catherine Lee, there are over 400 streams of this sort in Taiwan, and if artists could launch a similar campaign for each one to get local communities concerned and involved with riparian environments, the result would be cleaner streams, then cleaner rivers, and then a cleaner ocean.
In the Environmental Art Movement at Plum Tree Creek, artists lead students from Zhuwei Elementary School along the length of the creek, from the upstream reaches on down, so that they can become familiar with its colors and listen to its birds and insects. These types of outings are incorporated into schools’ art instruction. During the course of the project, the artists have discovered that most children are very unfamiliar with this stream near their homes.
“To raise local consciousness, you’ve got to have some social groups to take the lead,” says Lee, who mentions the example of Zhuwei Elementary School, where the artists have piqued the interest of the students, and then the teachers. The teachers want to continue this type of education for the sake of the students. Now the students at Zhuwei High School have a Plum Tree Creek activity club.
Wu organized monthly breakfast meetings for a time to afford people living along the upper, middle, and lower stretches of the creek chances to get together and communicate. Participants discussed what was happening in the creek near their homes, recalled times past, and in the process put together the story of the whole creek. And the artists from the BCS were involved throughout the entire process.
At the breakfast meetings, they used vegetables grown by residents living near the upper reaches of the stream, and made sure that the food tied in to the seasons. During the meetings, which continued for a year, they arranged for antiquarians, ecologists, hydrological experts, and other such persons to take part in the discussions and provide their views regarding the future of Plum Tree Creek.
In 2012 the BCS launched a community theater. They got together with old folks in the area to look at old photos and talk about the old days, which they then incorporated into plays in which local senior citizens acted under the direction of BCS artists. Says Lee: “Every single person played a part in this art action.”
Wu Yu-chien, Document VI (1998)