A Silent Process

Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, 2024

[….Here, the artist is not "nature", but the "making-as" (being affected or shaped) that connects life experiences and emotions. These "making-as" drive individuals among the "migrants" to undertake actions of various "secret" gardens. As an artist, Tuan Mami brings voice to “the secret” and "the silent," this mediator is no longer a caretaker, but a "dis-paracolonizer" for those who have come to Taiwan as a new caretaker. The "secret" or "silent" in the secret garden, silent garden or mute process ("Immigrant Garden") is first of all something that cannot be identified as reasonable or legitimate excluded from "labor" or "profit," a nameless action seeking "definite happiness." This action allows individuals to preserve a cultural and spiritual connection with one's homeland. This involves not only caring for plants but also caring for memory and bodily sensations. Additionally, the process relies on the transplantation of ecological relationships and environmental fragments. Through the cycle of care and harvest by migrants, plants become both derivatives of life as well as metaphors and exploring tentacles of lives. With these two beforementioned internal relationships and cultural ties, there emerges the possibility of communication among these migrants, transcending different encounters and developmental disparities. This integration leads to the community experience of life interaction and cultural migration in a foreign land. However, the most profound aspect within is marking a posture on crossing national boundaries, which creates a discreet, noble yet humble escape for self-preservation. If the "garden" is a facsimile of various scenes created by the "nature-artist," this facsimile can develop into a "nature-system" that demonstrates cosmology. Like a "landscape garden," it transforms internality into a landscape system composed of natural materials, resembling one after another paintings-movie constructed at walking speed, or in other word, works of "cosmic art" (kósmos technès). Yet, the "vegetable garden" further breaks away from the pure transcends the pure "intuitive" projection above-mentioned onto natural objects, embedding more layers of life relations and life connections, intertwined with labor, the pace of conversations, the posture of observation and searching, and the intertwining and inner-unfolding of different life mechanisms. This creates a kind of evolution of action videos between short clips and long takes: a work of life art (zoe technès). The silence of plants provides a crucial sense of security for those planting in a foreign land. This sense of security means that their life imagery is protected and preserved, and the "closed" and "silent" form of seeds gradually becomes a symbol of "promise" for the future. The transmission and growth of these edible seeds offer Vietnamese migrants involved in the project certain expectations for "life": First, they serve as a spiritual connection to their land (homeland); second, they act as a silent mediator between migrants and Taiwan, helping overcome life conflicts; third, they become an "immanence" that extends life externally, serving as an equal language and silent discourse in exchanges; fourth, the artist facilitates the integration of life between plants and migrants, with plants entering into complex migration issues, while migrants infuse their interiority into the endless details of plant growth. Tuan Mami captures how "seeds" link their cross-cultural daily life and emotions in migration. In the process of this project, "seeds" unfold multi-layered meanings for migrants, communities, and the artist. These layered meanings are not metaphorical but are energies that trigger the practical significance of emotions, actions and relationships. In the garden, nature and participants are also the artists co-operating on edible materials, while Tuan Mami can be described as a "dis-paracolonizer" with seeds as his subject. The dis-paracolonizer turns seeds into unsolved puzzles, constantly discovering and creating space within the puzzle itself. This allows us to imagine the tensions, power relations, violent conflicts, and interests that may arise between migrants and locals, between migrants and new lands, and between secret plants and locals, which can be "dissolved" in the evolution of the "garden."….]

This introduction is excerpted from an article [A Secret Process : Discovering Dis-paracolonizer from the "Vietnamese Immigrating Garden"] By Huang Chien-Hung(Director of KdMoFA)

@Photo by Chu Chi Hung