Hongmaogang village (1624-2008) was wiped off the map by relocation. This relocation project took the longest time (38 years from planning to completion), involved the largest scale of households (11,237), affected the highest number of people (20,931), and cost the hugest amount of governmental expenditure (32.9 billion) in the history of Taiwan. In this case, the government adopted the ideology of “high modernity” and drew up the relocation plan and regulations in the name of economic development. In other words, the government regarded Hongmaogang village as a laggard, underdeveloped, and hopeless community. This mindset not only justified the governmental policy of prohibiting the villagers from expanding their houses, but also facilitated the implementation of relocation.

The solo exhibition “Records of the Relocation of Hongmaogang Village” presents the artist’s image works that focus on the ruins of the villagers’ houses that the demolition from 2007 to 2008 left in. The contents of these images include the objects originally belonged to the houses, the traces left by the objects in the space after the objects were removed, and the industrial landscapes viewed outward from the broken windows.

The remains provide the investigation into the villagers’ life history with useful material. The samples include the appearances of the houses in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the ruins after the houses were abandoned after 2000. These samples cover a span of 40 years. As a result, to represent the villagers’ life history, it is critical to select the objects and parts of the houses to be exhibited and to contemplate the way of transforming the sites of the ruins into a bright theater of objects. The purpose of the object theater is to highlight the social and historical values of Hongmaogang ignored by the governmental development plan under the doctrine of National Developmentalism. As memorial supplements, traces fill in the space left by the removed objects. The layers of interweaving imprints on the walls depict the sequence of happenings deeply buried in the villagers’ memory. If the remains represent a frozen scene of the villagers’ life in a specific time and space, then the traces will enable us to read the villagers’ life experience. The views from the windows represent the villagers’ deep affection to the land. However, Hongmaogang village was wiped off the map due to industrial expansion. The impressions on the landscapes are reproduced repeatedly in the villagers’ memory, while the window views become discrete fragments of the topography of Hongmaogang.

The photographs in this exhibition not only convey a wave of nostalgia for the vanished fishing village, but also point out the necessity of reconsider a more prudent way through which we can properly deal with the values of local history and culture in the process of urban planning and remedy the deficiency of ignoring local history and culture caused by the national developmentalist ideology.

*image (left)
© Chen Po-I
provided by KdMoFA