Tree Tree Tree Person 2025 – Weaving in the Fissures: Land Narratives and Memories of Skadang X Kipatauw

Hana’s Project, Ami Lien & Enzo Camacho, 2025

During the residency, I had been making handmade paper from locally foraged plant fibers, guided by my hosts’ knowledge of the Taroko forest, and borrowing materials and resources available from their daily life in the mountains. One leading question in my (collaborative) practice is: how can we re-imagine the ground (the land) against colonial occupation and imperialist economies of extraction? Making paper from foraged materials aids my more theoretical and social research into this question.

Xiaobing and I collaboratively organized a paper-making and fiber-dying workshop and discussion with members of the Skadang tribe and the wider community. In this workshop, we shared our learnings from our residency experiments with Taroko forest materials. Because many of the plants have traditional and contemporary use values to the Skadang Truku tribe, we hope that processing them together would bring to the surface memories and activities related to the community’s continuing relationship with the Taroko mountains.

During the residency period, I attended a People’s Conference Against Climate Imperialism and Militarism taking place in the Philippines. As the local tragedy from Typhoon Ragasa has made clear, climate change is disproportionately affecting the already most disenfranchised communities around the world. After attending this conference, I will organize a sharing session at TheCube Project Space about how progressive peoples’ movements in Asia are coming together and fighting back against the Imperialist and Militarist agendas which are the main drivers of our current climate condition.

The House Project: Circling Home, 2025

In an age when AI can rapidly generate images detached from human time and labor, my residency in Taroko, Beitou, and Yangmingshan revealed another kind of imagery–one formed through bodily work, repetition, and accumulated memory. Inspired by the nesting behavior of potter wasps, this project explores the meaning of “home” and belonging. A potter wasp can carry only a small mouthful of soil at a time, circling endlessly between forest, mountain, and nest until a complete home is built. This slow, cyclical act mirrors the human process of constructing life through movement and endurance.

During the residency, I gathered abandoned potter wasp nests and fired them into ceramics, transforming these fragile, ephemeral structures into enduring cultural artifacts. Each soil–from Taroko’s rocky terrain to Beitou’s sulfur scent and Yangmingshan’s volcanic ash–bears traces of local memory and life.

The work adopts the potter wasp’s point of view, peering from within the nest toward the human world. Through clay and narrative imagery, it evokes the tension between darkness and emergence, enclosure and exploration. Visitors encounter both the ceramic nests and the imagined inner landscapes, experiencing a shift in perspective–from inside to outside, from human gaze to nonhuman perception. This circling movement becomes a gesture of “returning home,” tracing our intertwined relationship with land, nature, and memory.

Will the Soil Remember?, Candice Jee (Biang), 2025

*Note: I wish to honour the traditional and ongoing custodians of the land of Dali-Datong–the Truku people–and pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.

Over the handful of years I’ve been in Skadang, plants in my projects have been used as a medium to consider place and belonging in the land: both native and naturalised plants have together described the experiences that my host families have shared with me, tracing their belongings to and displacements from the Taroko National Park.

This time, returning to Skadang a year after the 0403 earthquake, I noticed how natural disaster, paired with the inevitable passing of time, has caused more Truku elders to no longer be able to return to their ancestral lands in the mountains.

In the plains, I saw my host Yaya Huwat’s endless toil in continuing the Truku traditional farming methods outside of the mountains, including polycultural farming without using chemical herbicides, pesticides nor fertilisers. Weaving plant life and ecological webs, she nurtures the earth in her use of it, rather than extracting from and destroying it. Her year of absence from her land in the mountains has resulted in much less plant diversity there.

In honour of these traditional farming methods, I experimented with natural dyeing, including dyeing with foraged forest plants and the Truku traditional material of kmagas from Skadang, as well as plants from Truku gardens in both the plains and the mountains, to explore the relationship with land that Yaya carries with her from her ancestral land in the mountains down to the plains.

Meanwhile, on the banks of the Keelung River in Taipei, Ketagalan teacher Avas showed us where taro grows by the river’s concrete embankments, a delicate trace of the polycultural gardens that were tended there before the Ketagalan people were displaced by Taipei’s militarisation and urbanisation. It reminded me of the taro that grows alongside the forest road in Skadang. Traditional gardens in the mountains are disappearing now too.

Will the soil remember the ways that were cared for it? Will the forest remember those who lived with it? Or will it only bear traces of destruction and disappearance?

My experiments also attempt to substitute the mined minerals used in contemporary plant dyeing methods with traditional and more sustainable materials. The perceived “failures” and lack of control in these tests perhaps echo the struggles and dilemmas that humans face living in and with nature, which are as present today than ever, if not more. 

Alang Skadang – Observation Notes, Part 2, Wan-Hsuan Tsai and Yannick Dauby, 2025

The mountain collapsed.
Boulders rolled.
Branches flew.
Houses tilted.
Trails gave way.
How are the animals and people in the mountains now?

In 2022, Wan-Hsuan Tsai and Yannick Dauby, together with their two children, went up the mountains for the Three Tree Tree Person Project. They lived in the Rainbow House of Datong village and later co-presented Alang Skadang – Observation Notes, Part 1, documenting the self-built mountain home, its flow of daily operations, and its relationship with surrounding resources. The work also depicted the everyday lives of domestic animals, traditional hunting traps, and the intertwined personal and communal stories of the house’s inhabitants.

In the summer of 2025, more than a year after the devastating 0403 Hualien earthquake, Tsai and Dauby returned to Taroko. Together with the hosts of the Rainbow House–Simat Qurang and Biyu Mopo and with Yeyku Rikaw from the Sapah Yeyku, they once again made their way up the mountain. Along the route, they recalled and retold fragments of experiences after the earthquake, sharing what they witnessed while venturing downhill, as well as the accounts of those who had stayed behind in the mountains–their observations of the landscape, and the subtle transformations of the household animals that remained in the mountain homes.

They also visited Mr. Chang Mu-Lin, a scholar who has studied Taroko plant ecology and native vegetation restoration for over twenty years. Drawing on his long-term field experience, he offered reflections on how plants might respond to such catastrophes–disasters that, for animals, are often devastating beyond measure.

If I were a deer, I would run faster than the landslide.
If I were a wild boar, I would leap over the tumbling rocks.
If I were a monkey, I would climb through the branches back to my family.
If I were a cat, I would hide behind the house.
If I were a dog, I would never leave my owner.

On the Underside of Leaves, Ju-An Hsieh, 2025

During my residency, my body and dreams shift along the journey–somewhat like a cicada.

Before shedding its skin, the cicada’s epidermal cells slowly separate from its old exoskeleton, leaving a delicate space in between. When the time comes, the adult pushes itself through the crack on its back and meets the outer world. If sleep is like the cicada’s molting, then dreams exist in the gap between skins–a liminal space born from the transition between the old and the new body.

The body entrusts its memories and sensations to dreams, making them the source of creation. Whether on Ketagalan sacred mountains–Qixing Mountain–or on Liwu Mountain, home to the Taroko people, dreamlike visions appear everywhere. Many insects hide motionless beneath the leaves, as if in a collective sleep. Every winged creature carries a trace of the dream—they can do what our bodies cannot, and that captivates me.

I have heard that when hunters in the mountains dream of spring, such dreams are often connected to their prey–summoning the encounter before it happens. Here, the dreamer and the interpreter meet; through dreams, we recall what the body once possessed and lost, what has not yet happened but is already arriving.

Amid this ceaseless interchange of night and day, dream and waking, the body remains the only clue–guiding me to trace, to guess, and to seek the mother tongue and the yesterdays I have never known.