Editor’s Note

WEAD honors Wu Mali as Featured Artist for Issue #4.  For twenty plus years, she has worked throughout Taiwan to disseminate awareness of community based feminist and environmental art.  A quintessential multi-tasker, Mali wears multiple art coats: a progressive conceptual artist, educator, translator, environmentalist, feminist, activist, and educator.   Just ten years ago few Taiwanese knew more about art than what was shown in galleries and museums.  Today, thanks to Mali’s groundworks, a new generation of Taiwanese artists has emerged to create urban and rural projects–working with communities, scientists, and institutions, to clean wetlands, save soil and species, often using indigenous materials and traditions. 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

IN THE PAST 10 YEARS, MY ARTWORKS HAVE focused on issues of community and environment, and my working method has evolved from engaging the public to combining my artistic practice with research and teaching in the university.

 

 

I.  INTRODUCING SOCIAL CRITICAL ARTWORKS TO TAIWAN

DURING THE 80’S AND 90’S, INSPIRED by the avant-garde art movement, I translated books about Dadaism, the biography of Joseph Beuys, and developments of “action art” to introduce social and critical artworks to the Chinese-speaking world.

Back then, the art community in Taiwan still held to the idea of “art for art sake.”  But after the ban on Martial Law in Taiwan in 1987, we were confronted with intense political changes that I reconsidered how art might reconnect to the actual living world and people.

 

II. NEW CRITICAL WORKS, 1990′s

MY WORKS IN THE 90′S RESPONDED TO SOCIAL issues.  I reinvestigated the relations of women throughout history, urban development, and economics from a feminist point of view. This series of works, including Stories of Women from Hsing-Chuang (1997), Epitaph (1997), Formosa Club (1998), Birds Slide over the Sky (1998), etc. were exhibited at Treasure Island, San Francisco, CA in 1998.  By representing individual stories, I revealed biases in the “official narration” of history.

 

I began wondering how critical works could be more than just displays in a museum or gallery space, how to actually connect works with audience, and furthermore, how to initiate change and give the voiceless a voice.  I became inspired by historical avant-garde strategies such as art interventions critiquing social practices and ethics.

 

III.  OUTSIDE THE GALLERY:  TAIWANESE FEMINIST ART

AS A CONSEQUENCE OF MY CONTACT WITH the Taiwanese feminism movement, I collaborated with Taipei Women’s Awakening Association (TWAA) from 2000 to 2004 on the Fun Textile Workshop, producing a community-based art project, Awake in Your Skin.

TWAA organized the Fun Textile Workshop for housewives from traditional communities, and aimed to inspire these conservative women to become aware of public issues through textile arts workshops.  The gatherings, however, failed to fulfill such objectives.  Later, when I myself started to participate in the workshop, I used the concept of “subversive stitching” to help these women review their actual life experiences via their familiar sewing technique.  By sharing stories, they began to think out-of-the-box and understand that everything personal is political.  The women began to see new possibilities in themselves.

 

 

There are three works in the series Awake in Your Skin: Bed Sheets of Soul, Theater Under the Skirts, and Empress’ New Dresses.  We explored women’s personal life experiences, desires, and identities through intimate material, such as fabrics.  This particular experience allowed me to witness the force of art.  Unlike an abstract or formal discussion common in art circles, working on these pieces initiated changes through the subtle approach of art: calling forth the experiences of real lives through simple lines, materials, and techniques.  Experienced activists in the feminist movement were impressed by our final presentation, for their life-long pursuits were already rooted in the local communities.

However, art education and our feminism movement— were still appealing only to subjects from the elite class, and could not be understood by everyone.  TWAA later produced the film Stitching Sisterhood for their campaign to help initiate changes in middle and lower classes through creative media.  We also spread understanding through discussions and writing.  By attending sharing sessions I saw how art can transform public life.

 

IV.  INTRODUCING NEW GENRE PUBLIC ART TO TAIWAN

I WAS STILL UNCLEAR ABOUT WHAT KIND of art intervention would be appropriate.  I started to translate the book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (ed. Suzanne Lacy) with some friends, and later another book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art by Grant Kester.

During this time, I participated in the project Taipei City On The Move curated by Jo Hsiao and the Public Art Seminar organized by the Dimension Endowment of Art, and introduced Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacob (who curated Culture in Action in Chicago) to the organizers.

Lacy and Jacob were invited to promote community-based art practices and curatorial works in Taiwan.  This phenomenally inspired local art practices and academic discussions on aesthetics. I began thinking more about relations between art and democracy, and community interventions.

 

V.  ENGAGING RURAL COMMUNITIES

IN 2005, I WAS INVITED TO CURATE AN ART FESTIVAL in mostly agricultural Chiayi County, where there was a lack of cultural resources.  I proposed a participatory project to engage different communities and social clubs to reflect on the conditions of withering rural villages caused by globalization and urbanization.  Young people were leaving the countryside for cities, and the original structure of rural villages was collapsing.  Meanwhile, over-populated cities had become cogs in the machinery of the capitalist world factory and were vulnerable to a diminishing humanity.

I wanted to reconsider the values of life in rural areas and find opportunities to reconstruct human relations again there.  In this project, I invited local and foreign artists to plant trees along the Tropic of Cancer.

 

 

VI.  ART AS ENVIRONMENT — RURAL ART RESIDENCY

FROM 2006 TO 2007, I CURATED ANOTHER project Art as Environment: A Cultural Action on the Tropic of Cancer, Chiayi County. Instead of asking artists to exhibit their works, we offered them residencies in rural villages to converse with residents and develop possible collaborations.  In two years, more than 30 artists participated in 20 different communities.  With the assistance of the Chiayi Culture Bureau, this project’s sites included mountains, plains and beaches around Chiayi County, and had an enormous impact on the region.

The rural populations consisted mostly of elderly people and children.  Artists organized photography and drawing classes to teach children how to document their own surroundings, and collaborated with daycare centers to teach pottery-making, dancing and drumming.

 

 

We also encouraged local residents to re-envision their own traditional culture in new ways, e.g. making their own traditional handcrafted object for rituals, stories, and town histories.  Due to the participation of local people, community life was reshaped.  This successful project earned a great deal of approval.  People began to realize that art could facilitate a different mobility in community building and create values with diverse approaches.

This project challenged artists to really look at Taiwanese social issues.  The art action was later used as an example to demonstrate the central government’s policy-making in relation to artist residency programs, art interventions, and community building.

 

VII.  WATER PROJECTS

BEFORE THE PROJECT OF ENVIRONMENTAL ART action in Chiayi, I created, By the River, on the River, of the River (2006), in collaboration with several community colleges in both Taipei City and Taipei County.  It addressed the conditions of the four main rivers, which converge into the Pacific around my home in Tamsui, Taipei.  For research, we took many river- trekking trips guided by local environmentalists.

 

 

I also made Taipei Tomorrow as a Lake again with the Organization of Urban Re-s (OURs) for the 2008 Taipei Biennial to investigate the potential influence of climate change on Taipei. Through a series of workshops, we created an art platform for urban planners and environmentalists to discuss and offer proposals for the future of Taiwan.

Community work requires long-term commitment to help people manage their own communal affairs.  These are usually highly complex and intertwined with peculiar social, economic and ecological context.

In 2010, I started a project in my own neighborhood collaborating with Margaret Shiu, director of the Bamboo Curtain Studio, Jui-Mao Huang, professor in the Architecture Department, Tamkang University, local students from elementary and junior high schools, and friends.  I was interested in creating a sustainable long term project. We proposed ideas to deal with pollution of Plum Tree Creek, and offered artistic proposals to improve the living quality in our own neighborhood.

 

VIII.  CONCLUSION

UNDER THE GREAT CHALLENGE OF CLIMATE change, we hope the fairness we seek can be realized in our environment.  I still believe in what I stated in the project, Art as Environment: A Cultural Action on the Tropic of Cancer, that “art is not for beautification, but a means of evoking, connecting and provoking.”

 

Montery Bay, CA

 

THIS ESSAY IS TAKEN FROM A KEYNOTE given at a WEAD conference in 2001 following 9/11 and updated now, a decade later.

 

 

 

I.  AFFIRMING AND RENEWING VALUES

 

WITHIN OUR WORK AS ARTISTS AND ACTIVISTS it seems even more critical to affirm and renew our values at this time of global disasters and wars and a decade after 9/11. In the wake of the World Trade tragedy we were left with a sense of turmoil, fear, impending destruction, and an earth in chaos.  In these ten years since that fateful day we have seen a greater and expanding sense of this turmoil in global wars and displacements, the Katrina floods, two devastating Tsunamis in Asia,  earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, and the oil-rig disaster of Deepwater/Horizon. All of this, as well as the continuing effects of global warming, brings us as artists concerned with environmental and cultural health to an even deeper concern and responsibility. We are perhaps at a turning point in which we must evaluate the many complex ways we can move our art in service of our earth.

 

II.  RECLAIMING PRACTICES

 

 

AT TIMES LIKE THESE WE MUST RECALL FOR ourselves what draws us to our work, reclaim the feminist and multicultural practices related to our values on the environment.

 

As artists and activists in the shadow of the millennium we are creating a new art through metaphor, symbolism and complex analysis which links our understanding of both nature and culture in this artistic response.

Our struggle for balance begins with our own indigenous history of peoples of the Americas.  Even the ancient Mesoamericans knew that our life on this earth was brief – like the spring grass and the flowers we bud, blossom, dry up and blow away.  We are living here as the flowers in nature’s cycle.

 

We are reminded of the poignant words of Chief Seattle in his letter to the Whiteman :

 

“What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered?  The wild horses tamed?  What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires?  Where will the thicket be?  Gone!  And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt?  The end of living and the beginning of survival.  When the last Redman has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be there?  Will there be any spirit of my people left?”

 

 

 

 

His words remind us that relations in the world are not just between humans and nature but humans one to another reflects our ecology together on this planet.

The affects of poverty and economics and the vulnerability of our communities are evident when we see toxic dump sites concentrated in communities of color. Artistic collectives like ADOBE LA ( Artists, Designers on the Border Edge of Los Angles) have documented these sites in maps hidden in public art works. We see where families and children suffer the consequences of illnesses, global struggles for clean water and the basic rights of farm workers to safe labor conditions free from pesticides. We must be vigilant against the false polarities of immigration and conservation in an era of dwindling resources.

 

In my own work the landscape is referenced to reveal our histories and our conflicts. My installations for over the last two decades have addressed nature  through themes of spirituality, stewardship, and balance.  In many of my pieces nature and landscape are metaphors for the balance of life, healing and death in family, and labor narratives.

 

 

 

 

We must bring to the forefront the practices that enable artists to do social justice work. It is critical that we make linkages between the peril of the earth and the role of the artist and their practices of reflection, analysis, or activism. Our art forms can bring us closer to nature and healing and inspire us to revision the world.  Art can also be a tool for understanding the ecological practices needed and the place of artists collaborating in this endeavor.

 

III.  PUBLIC SPACES

 

 

 

ARTISTS SHARE PUBLIC SPACE AND LANDSCAPE in the fullness of both bio-diversity and cultural diversity.

 

In cities across the country we are involved in the rethinking of public life, a more equitable access to space, and inclusive public art that places the artist at the boundary between the public and the private. In this artistic activism we use both analysis and practice.  This has become more clear to me in the years that I worked with my colleagues founding a program of Visual and Public Art at California State University at Monterey Bay in 1997- present.

 

The university was created out of the old Fort Ord Military Base and offered us a chance to create the 21^st campus in the CSU system for a 21^st century. It is situated on the Monterey Peninsula near to the affluent cities of Monterey, Carmel and Pacific Grove. Yet the university is all connected to nearby Salinas, Watsonville and Seaside, all communities of color. When I first began developing community contacts in our region for our program I often drove from the university to Salinas traveling down Blanco Road (the white road ) watching from my car window the farm workers bent over the strawberry fields often seven days a week.  When I am on Blanco road, the white road, I think about how people live and the economies of space.

 

Some classes of people live their public lives privately because of gated communities, guards, servants and on-line services. Where other classes of people must live their private lives in public because we have not provided adequate recreational space, affordable housing and healthcare.  It is truly a geography of inequity in our region and not unlike the geographies of inequity that mark the world.

 

The role of the artist in this environment is critical. We are redefining the artist not as lonely hero/genius, but rather as a social architect, as cultural citizen concerned with the communities rights to identity and space, and as a mediator and problem solver at the edges of shifting and permeable borders between the private and the public.

 

IV.  PRACTICING COMMUNITY ART

 

 

 

 

MANY OF US HAVE BEEN DRAWN TO THE WORK in community in hopes of a creating a transformative practice that is inherently social and spiritual at its core.  Nature and landscape bear the signs of our abuse, they stand as a witness to our histories of struggle.  The terrain we enter is like our mother earth and many of us have cultivated feminist and multicultural strategies of inclusion in making art with people not simply for people.

 

These practices form an artistic pedagogy that engages a reciprocal teaching and learning.  Our communities bring their funds of knowledge to the collaborative process of design and implementation.  If we are truly reciprocal we are making work that affirms the assets our communities and brings a greater understanding across our differences.

 

As artists our practices bring us into relation with individuals, families, communities, institutions and civic bureaucracies in the development and completion of a project.  Often these encounters are difficult and require tenacity, a spirit of collaboration and a passionate resiliency.  I am reminded of the case of Patricia Johanson works, Endangered Garden, SF Garter Snake, Butterfly Marsh and Barrier spit, 1988 at the Sunnydale pump station and holding tank for water and sewage plant.

 

Under the San Francisco art Commission I inherited oversight, as a commissioner, in the late 80’s for Ms. Johanson’s project.  Through the ten-year process in which the cultural affairs department bifurcated the sewage plant from the garden we came to understand that the garden had only been used to disguise an unwanted and unpleasant sewage plant. Once it was approved the public art project was separated and lingered and diminished in its scope from the once brilliant ecological vision to a much smaller and little appreciated garden. With the support of project manger Jill Manton Ms. Johanson was able to realize some of the original project but only the artist’s tenacity over a decade brought this project to near completion.  This is only one of many stories of bureaucracy and artistic resiliency.

 

There are so many legendary artists who work also as collaborators and in practices of analysis and activism. Artists like examples like Mel Chin, the Harrisons and Reiko Goto and Tim Collins at  9 Mile Run are but a few. Their practices suggest to us the skills that we must teach to our students so that they can bring together bio diversity and cultural diversity. Our challenge is to prepare younger artists that these two aspects of social justice are not separate but can be brought together.

 

Many of you have done the work on the ground to transform the communities you live and work in. We are now trying to codify the ways in which we work to pass on these practices to emerging artists who will carry on this work.  This legacy is at the heart of what we are trying to do at Visual and Public Art department at California State University at Monterey Bay.  This program was originally conceptualized by Judith Baca, Suzanne Lacy, ,Johanna Poethig, Stephanie Johnson and myself. It is a program of studio arts, theory and education models committed to community practice that focuses through skills of :

 

Research and Analysis,

Self and Identity,

Community,

Collaboration and planning,

Production,

Revision,

Distribution.

 

Our work is founded on the university’s vision of ethics, social justice, global and environmental responsibility and service.  In particular our Service Learning model links service,  analysis, compassion, justice and reflection.

 

 

 

 

We work to integrate these skills as an ongoing set of practices within a critical approach to our relationship to public space.  Our spatial theories are driven by work by theorists such as Edward Soja, Michel Dear, Jennifer Wolch and Henry Lefebre.

 

We know that all space is at all times social, physical, and geographic and that no space is empty when we reach it, the memories of those who walked before us are there.

 

We know that space can be inclusive or exclusive and that the construction of space is ongoing as a social, spiritual, political and economic practice.

Edward Soja’s theories on social and public space and histories of the disenfranchised have been very critical to understanding the issue of nature and landscape.

 

“ We see how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into an apparent innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies became filled with politics and ideology” [i]

In our age the greatest social public space is the Internet with its global power. Activists around the world give us hope as examples of the interconnectedness of world economies, the natural world, labor, cultural right are brought to bear through the worldwide web.

NYC, NY

I STARTED OUT AS A POET BUT gave up poetry for the visual expression when I lost my language.

I realized that art had to change in a world drastically changing, when humanity was facing major decisions in order to survive on the planet while striving to maintain moral values and quality of life. I wanted to cleanse art from its elitist self-involvement, to achieve greater universal validity. I left the ivory tower of my studio and entered the world of concerns. I wrote books, spoke at global conferences and began to create large scale environmental projects I called Philosophy in the Land. I created Rice/Tree/Burial, the first large scale ecological site work in 1968 with these concerns in mind.

These works probed ecological, cultural, and social issues; explored the paradoxes of human existence, and addressed global survival. I began by visualizing invisible process such as logic, thought processes, evolution, time, music, and mathematics. Some of these works became the building blocks for my pyramids, expressions of social philosophy: an investigation of what it means to be human. The early Philosophical Drawings took me into the sciences, technology, dialectics, symbolic logic, theology, time, truth functions. I was beginning to unite disciplines alienated through specialization, and came to look at art as an integrator of disciplines and the role of the artist as developing a new vision for humanity.

I believe that the new role of the artist is to create an art that questions the status quo and the direction life has taken, the endless contradictions we accept and approve, offering intelligent alternatives

The issues touched on in my work range between individual creation and social consciousness. They address the challenges of global survival and are often monumental in scale.

I plant forests on abused land to be kept alive for centuries and fields of grain in the heart of megacities. This work goes beyond just planting a field or a forest, or creating a masterplans for large territories in need of rebuilding. It is benign problem solving and shaping, structuring the future: an egoless art form that calls attention to social concerns and involves people from all walks of life.

The philosophy behind my work is to create meaningful and memorable works of art that build pride and self esteem in people, inspiring young minds to feel good about themselves and have the courage to achieve their dreams. These works are intended to help the environment and benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy. I am a pioneer of ecological environmental art.

This new art form goes beyond the self and the ego without being selfless. It assumes the difficult task of maintaining a delicate balance between thinking globally and acting independently, for the ego must remain intact to allow the self to act fearlessly, with the certainty and confidence necessary for true creation, while the ego must be relinquished in order to think universally and for the good of others.

Designing space is complicated. We can go inward into inner space and out into the universe. The distance is about the same. For me both of these journeys are necessary. Some of my work deals with this inner space, visualizing invisible processes such as time, mathematics, logic, thinking processes, evolution, and so on. Other works are dealing with very large spaces, large by necessity in order to rebuild our environment and make a difference.

Artistic vision, image, and metaphor are powerful tools of communication that can become expressions of human values with profound impact on our consciousness and collective destiny.

Rice/Tree/Burial, first realized in 1968, was philosophical in orientation and dealt with our relationship to the earth. I planted a rice field above the Niagara gorge at the border of the US and Canada, chained a sacred Indian forest, and buried a time capsule to be opened in 1000 years–it included my Haiku poetry. I kept no copies. Then I went out to the edge of Niagara Falls and for eight days and nights lived a foot away from the torrent. It was a “symbolic” event that announced my commitment to environmental issues and human concerns.

In 1982 I created Wheatfield—A Confrontation, planting and harvesting 2 acres of wheat in Manhattan’s financial district on land worth $4.5 billion. The work addressed greed and misplaced priorities. Wheatfield was a calling to account, it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns.

Another project, Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years, 1982-1996. commissioned ten years after its design, is a 400 year project, allowing the ecosystems to rebuild itself. It is considered one of the largest reclamation sites in the world and the first to deal with creating a man-made virgin forest for our descendants. It involves the first human contract that reaches 400 years into the future.

A millennial work is a 25 year masterplan that involves 85 kilometers of the center of the Netherlands to be restructured and made environmentally conscious and sustainable. I spent a year creating a complex masterplan that would protect a land sitting below sea level from the flooding and erosions it faces. To deal with the expense, I designed a full size glass fortress that stands as total opposite to the opaque fortresses of the past occupying the site. With its myriads of reflections this unique structure will enhance tourism and help defray some of the costs involved

My forest in Australia of 6000 trees planted in 1998 addresses endangered species and land erosion. And Poetry Walk at the University of Virginia rescues the essence of great minds from sinking into dusty memory by bringing them into fruitful use and present relevance.

These projects are difficult because there is no precedence for them.

But as difficult as it is to realize these works, it is absolutely necessary to make them happen all over the world as examples of what needs to be done to restore landfills, or destroyed, barren land where resource extraction has taken its toll, and on deforested soil to stop erosion, purify the air, protect fresh ground water and provide home for wildlife. And to create them in the nervous tension of cities, to give people a chance to stay in touch with nature, allowing it to speak its own special language articulated through human intelligence.

Although I am foremost an artist, my large scale environmental work requires knowledge beyond the techniques of art and becomes a blend of architecture, landscaping, design, urban planning, soil science, mathematics, forestry, the social sciences and philosophy.

So many wonderful, strangely spiritual things happened to me while working out in nature that wouldn’t have happened cooped up in a studio. When I was creating Rice/Tree/Burial, Indian spirits hovered above us. I photographed the phenomena because no one would have believed it. We had been told that the Indians who have been massacred there cursed the forest. I made peace with the Indians and made art from the phenomena.

I find it interesting that although my work is deeply rooted in science, technology and philosophy, I am often told that it has a sense of spirituality, a clarity that is different from how other people see things. I do believe there is something bigger than us, which I feel mostly in nature. In all my work I seek the invisible or the unknown. I felt this spirituality when I lived on the edge of Niagara Falls a foot from where 20 thousand gallons spilt over every second and I could have died in a moment, or hanging off a cliff carving poetry and ancient symbols into rocks, or having dead Indians dance over me in the tree limbs. It’s a kind of spirituality that looks at a blade of grass differently from others and sees its symbolism. This kind of work has a vitality that sensitizes people. It leaves you transfixed, speechless, somehow elevated and in a cleaner place where everything seems fresher and more poignant. And it manifests itself in nature if you have learned to see. It is powerful.

Today all my philosophical concepts seem to culminate and come to life in my environmental works. They begin their existence in the world when completed as works of art and come to full realization as they grow and evolve with the changing needs and perspectives of humanity.

© Agnes Denes (From a lecture.)