The Ocean Encountering River: Aquatic Aesthetics of An Island” project brings together anthropologist I-Yi Hsieh and Taiwanese artists Tzuan Wu, Yu-ping Guo, and Chen-chen Yu to investigate the deep time of Taipei basin from the perspective of wet lands and water ways conceived in the massive earthquake taking place in 1694 – a geological event widely recorded in travelogues, temple archives, and folklores. While some geologists remain dubious about whether the gestation of Taipei as a basin surrounded by mountains is indebted to this 1694 earthquake, the tales, maps, and narratives of a misty, watery lake of mega-size and meandering waterways has been narrated by early Han settlers as much as it is documented in maps and paintings by the Japanese in the 18th century – until the 1950s when many swamps and lakes got sealed by the post-war Nationalist regime.

The collaboration of an anthropologist and three visual, sculptural, and conceptual artists in leans closely to these aquatic experiences and wet narratives and aesthetics, rendering wetlands as a place of multispecies encounter where lively plants alongside mystic aquatic creatures - such as mermaids and clam spirits - come to the fore of how the deep time of Taipei reveals to us in a mixture of fictional and geological memories, the vibration of multispecies attunement and cohabitation.

Visual Art by Tzuan Wu