After his mother left farming, Huang Po-chih rediscovered the land

Q: Was it one (or more) key specific event, issue, or person that made you truly start to care about agriculture?

My mother's shifting career, from leaving farming to returning to it and all the twists and turns in between, has been a major factor shaping the direction of my creative work in recent years, and her unemployment was the biggest trigger of all. After all, her ups and downs have directly and indirectly affected my life in many ways. So it also gradually shifted my creative work from caring about my own problems to economic issues, agricultural issues, and even more simply to my mother's problems. But I think that through her, the problems of the entire system can also be reflected.

Q: How do you use the expertise and abilities you are best at to express your concern for agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, and to take concrete action?

I have always taken the role of an artist and expressed my concepts through artworks, exhibitions, and events. What I am best at is working with moving images and sound. Recently I have also used photography and recorded interviews to document the stories of women who have left farming, and my mother was the first person to be documented.

I also made these records the main content of my solo exhibition this year, "No. 147, Qingshui Village." Through her story and her shifting career, I think it can indirectly reflect the agricultural economic system reforms and social changes in Taiwan over the past 50 years, and it has also allowed me to know her past better. Many things I did not understand before I can now understand or forgive.

She has always had an optimistic, go-with-the-flow attitude, and she believes that the right things will gradually reveal their value. Now she happily enjoys the pleasure of organic farming and is getting to know the land she is familiar with all over again.
Interview recording

My mother was born in Qingshui Village, Xinpu, Hsinchu, and left the countryside at a very young age. But by a twist of fate, she later married back into the countryside. Farming, however, could not support a family, so she had no choice but to leave again to work elsewhere. She once worked in a garment factory and a processing factory, did home-based piecework, temporary work, in-factory work, and hourly work, and also received unemployment benefits. Over several decades of moving around, she settled at various times in Qingshui, Yangmei, Banqiao, Guanyin, Xinpo, Zhongli, and other places. Later, after my maternal grandmother passed away, the old family home in Qingshui needed someone to look after it, so she returned to Qingshui Village and took up organic farming.

During the recording process, my mother did not like being on camera. She always closed her eyes and slowly recounted memories of the past, so after discussion, we chose the four dogs closest to her life to appear on her behalf. Because they were things she was familiar with, she was also more willing and relaxed about participating in the filming, offering suggestions, and choosing together the photographs to be exhibited. This was a rather special and interesting experience in the process.

In the end, I used the recording of her oral life experience as the voice-over, and added three slide projectors playing images of the four dogs that sometimes overlapped, merged, faded in, faded out, or went out of focus, along with the sound of the projectors switching. This became the work "No. 147." My mother is like a cabin chief, leading four dogs that are always searching for the scent of memory, and also guarding my grandmother's soul, leading them through farming to rediscover the memories immersed in the land.
Exhibition documentation of No. 147, Qingshui Village

Another video work in the exhibition, "Four Brothers," involved me setting off smoke bombs in a ruined old neighbor's house and on an old trail where people once came and went, along with the stories my mother told. Although that was an era I never experienced, these lands and souls will always exist, in her memory and in her body.

She told three stories, and each of them happened to feature four brothers, so the work was named after that. The stories include memories of the past installation of the branch transmission towers of the Datan Power Plant in Qingshui and Guanyin. The route of the towers ran from Qingshui to Guanyin, which was exactly one of her life paths, that is, her marriage, yet the installation of the towers in the two places had completely different outcomes.

She also talked about the establishment of DuPont and the Sixth Naphtha Cracker, about how these enterprises lobbied villagers through the village chief to sell land at low prices, and about the outflow of the rural population, with neighbors vanishing as if they had disappeared from the world. Yet in order to preserve ownership of the buildings on the land, they kept their farmhouses, appearing and disappearing mysteriously, coming and going without a trace, occasionally returning to the old home to clean up, with only their voices heard and their figures never seen.

To me it sounded almost like a myth. Although life temporarily disappeared, these souls remained. The dogs always like to follow me to these places for walks. They desperately search for the scents of the past, as if talking to someone, immersing themselves in memory, in a myth I have never experienced.
Interview recording
Interview recording
Interview recording

Q: Please explain the actions you have taken or are taking, and how you are involved?

In the past I had several works mainly aimed at strengthening and improving the relationship between enterprises, consumers, and commodities. Through consumption, I turned product packaging into readable text, using sound, images, text, comics, and other means on the packaging so that consumers could read information about agriculture and the environment, hoping that consumption would carry value beyond price. In fact, this is a process of commodifying "reality," and this happens to also be the way the government has always dealt with our "reality."

"Fair Trade Icepop" should be my first work created entirely around agricultural issues as its main concept. Because this work was carried out through an actual commodity sales model, in the end, after deducting costs from the revenue, the surplus was donated to a student assistance program. "Fair Trade Icepop" was a collaboration with Spring One (Chun Yi Zhi) company. Because I identified with Spring One's philosophy and of course also thought it was delicious, I boldly proposed it to Spring One.

Naming it "Fair Trade Icepop" carries a somewhat ironic meaning, as it is not actually about discussing fair trade. Rather, through the production, consumption, and evaporation process of making icepops from fruit, it reflects the crisis of disappearance facing rural Taiwan, and also alludes to how it is not fair at all, with all the good things disappearing and evaporating.

The images and text on the icepop packaging explain the impact of various mistaken policies enacted by the government on Taiwan's agriculture, such as the loss of Taiwan's brand technology, the dumping of low-priced Chinese agricultural products back into Taiwan, the disappearance of farmland through illegal land enclosure, the lack of a production and marketing system, and the low food self-sufficiency rate, among others.
Photos of the work

For the work "Fair Trade Icepop," not counting the time for conceptual development, the actual production time was not long, about two months, mainly spent on designing the packaging and writing the text. The funding mainly came from the organization that curated the exhibition.

"Rural facelift war, prize money in the tens of millions"

A few days ago I remembered the summer lunches of my childhood, which were sometimes half a small yellow watermelon, eaten by scooping it out with a spoon. I casually asked my mother, "Do we not grow watermelon and rice at home anymore?" She replied, "Aiya, if you grow them you can't earn enough to eat them. Otherwise I would really like to go back to the countryside and grow vegetables, healthy and free." In my mother's words, one can actually hear the biggest problem farmers face: "you can't sell your goods," that is, the lack of a production and marketing system.

By contrast, the "Rural Regeneration Act," which was roughly reviewed and passed, plans to invest a special budget of 150 billion over ten years to carry out so-called "rural regeneration." In this law that copies Japan and imitates Germany, what we see are one facelift project after another for the rural landscape, but we do not see the national movement Japan is actively carrying out to "raise the food self-sufficiency rate," nor Germany's development plan based on the principle of "maintaining agricultural landscapes," and even less do we see legislation that shows consideration for farmers, truly serves farmers' interests, and safeguards the sustainability of rural areas. The skin is tightened, but who exactly is it for? Or is it just tightening the skin to win prize money?

Another work is "The Red Eyes of Tom Boy." The title comes from a once-popular cocktail culture: the name of a cocktail made with tomato juice and beer (Red Eye or Tom Boy). This series was a collaboration with comat, a brand of healthy organic tomato juice. I tried to use it to explore the interactive relationship between the tomato farming and processing industries and global political, economic, and environmental development, and through art to materialize "reality," bringing various different cluster relationships together. In the series, the place of origin, producer, variety, processing location, processing process, and production and marketing costs are all disclosed one by one. There is also a QR code link on the packaging that allows listeners to hear how tomato juice, as consumer culture, has risen and declined and transformed, and to present through fables and comics the flow of tomatoes within the transnational economic system. Finally, under the interaction of multiple texts, what I am curious about is how much more value a can of tomato juice originally priced at 50 yuan can bring me.

"The Red Eyes of Tom Boy" is an ongoing work, currently at V4.0, presented together with a comic installation and interviews with political refugees from East Turkestan (called Xinjiang in China). The raw materials for comat tomato juice mainly come from California, East Turkestan (Xinjiang), and Turkey, and are used in different products according to the characteristics of the varieties. The interviewee is a Uyghur footballer who was wanted for participating in the July 5 incident and was forced to flee to The Hague in the Netherlands. He spoke freely about his own experience of the July 5 incident, as well as the local political, economic, ethnic, and farmers' difficulties. In fact, East Turkestan is one of the most suitable regions in the world for growing tomatoes. The tomato industry is even called the "red industry" in China, but under capital expansion, what comes along with it is a "red crisis."

So I used the content of the interviews as text to explain the story derived from the tomato industry facing a major nuclear disaster, with tomatoes in their main production area of East Turkestan facing a crisis of mutation, confronting their own reproductive challenges and the possibility of transforming into biomass energy, thereby becoming independent and autonomous, and also imagining tomatoes becoming capital and turning back to devour humanity. The V4.0 series also collaborated with I Waterenergy Co., Ltd., trying to imagine the possibility of energy independence and autonomy, using tomato juice to drive a motor through a water battery principle and produce sound, becoming an independent march that operates without relying on an external power source. It also hopes that East Turkestan, currently the world's number one tomato producer, can sing its own independent march.

Of the income from "The Red Eyes of Tom Boy," 75% is reserved for purchasing costs and to pay the monthly vending machine rent of 3,250 yuan, 17.5% serves as a fund for subsequent creative projects, and the final 17.5% is donated to the child assistance program supported by the Zhishan Social Welfare Foundation (http://www.friendshipcit.org). During the project period, 1,200 yuan is donated regularly every month until the project ends.
Documentation of the exhibition site
Interview recording
Interview recording

Q: How does your action plan lead more people to participate? How is it sustained? How do you engage in dialogue with art audiences?

"Participation" is something I have always been thinking about. It also seems to involve the relationship between art and reality, but this relationship always seems somewhat paradoxical and is always hard to explain clearly in simple words, especially under the current "reality," that is, the state in which the environment and society are sick.

Art may find it relatively difficult to achieve the "participation" everyone expects, but I think the value of my artworks or projects does not lie in how many icepops were sold in the end or how many people held a can of tomato juice I designed. Rather, it lies in what different meanings and diversity of practice can be created through the commodities produced by the artist, and how, in the state of materializing "reality," one can avoid rigidity and keep things flowing. This should be the key to continuously generating dialogue with audiences, though it is also the most difficult part.

Q: In the process of thinking, creating, and acting, how do you interact with farming friends, rural areas, and farmers? What has been your greatest gain?

In my past work "Fair Trade Icepop," the people I came into contact with were processors, that is, manufacturers. I positioned myself between enterprises and consumers. My current creative work also does not directly come into contact with producers. The people I come into contact with and am interested in are women with backgrounds of having left farming. I am curious about the marginal experiences and shifts in values they may have encountered in the process. Most of them are friends of my mother, and I had some interactions with them in my own past life. I mainly conduct interviews through opportunities for everyday interaction.

I also try to release the artist's authority, hoping that the people being filmed and documented can participate in the creative process and choose the way they want to be recorded. My greatest gain is that my own judgments about the value of "people" have changed a lot, and I have also gained a bit more understanding.

Q: How can your actions continue to create deeper connections with and support for rural areas?

With my current way of creating, I think it is relatively difficult to create connections with rural areas as a whole, but I still hope that through my works, audiences can shift their values regarding rural areas, agriculture, and even people who have left farming or are unemployed.

Because I believe that art, as part of this society and reality, certainly has its power to create new spaces and politics. In any case, no matter where my art ultimately goes or what form it takes, I hope I can always keep my spirit rooted in my hometown, in agriculture and in the environment.

Q: How do you build a symbiotic, mutually supportive relationship with agricultural producers in your own "circle of life"?

This is a goal I have always hoped to achieve, but at present I still do not have the ability to create that kind of connection. I hope that one day I can have a team to develop products together that are both artistically conceptual and delicious, and can also solve problems.

Q: Regarding agriculture and the life of farming, is there a person, a passage, a book, or a film that once inspired you?

James C. Scott's book "Weapons of the Weak" takes the forms of peasant resistance in a small village mainly growing rice in Kedah, Malaysia, as its research target, and calls this resistance the "everyday form of peasant resistance": the unremarkable yet continuous struggles between peasants and those who try to extract labor, food, taxes, rent, and benefits from them. Through superficial compliance, fear, and caution, they avoid the risk of open collective resistance, and instead use individual, hard-to-notice behaviors such as slacking off, deception, disguise, feigning ignorance, playing dumb, petty theft, and covert sabotage as weapons to obtain a little bit of trivial benefit.

Between individuals, that is, between farmers and farmers, they connect through tacit understanding and informal networks. After accumulating a large number of insignificant actions, they subvert, and this subversion is not revolutionary resistance. It is simply for the chance to stay a little more in the middle of daily life, the chance to play in the middle.

There is also OPEN SOURCE ECOLOGY, which is committed to the independent development of agricultural machinery and open-sources the code, allowing farmers to manufacture agricultural machinery themselves at low cost to counter the high-priced agricultural machinery products of corporations. Another is the art group superflex, which treats art as a tool and a method for intervening in reality. The shifting role and position of the artist has also given me a lot of inspiration.

Q: For other young friends who want to support agriculture, please give them some practical advice, reference methods, and keys to action.

Perhaps you can start with the things you care about, whether production, processing, marketing, or even drawing comics. No matter how big or small, the point is to use your own interests and expertise to get involved, which will make it easier and happier. I think everyone has their own position from which they can do something. If everyone in every position contributes a little, how wonderful that would be.

Q: Based on your experience and understanding, what is your vision for the future of Taiwan's agriculture?

Seeing more and more people getting involved and caring about agricultural issues is very moving. I think that for good things, their value will gradually become apparent.

However, under constant changes in the environment and climate, it will also be a huge challenge. As my family says, in recent years the black gnats have become terrifyingly numerous, so itchy that people cannot work. This is just a simple little example, but it can reflect the drastic changes in the entire environment.

Q: What is your next plan or action related to Taiwan's agriculture, rural areas, and farmers?

At present I do not have a new plan directly related to agriculture. At this stage I will continue the interview records of women who have left farming and are unemployed, and will also continue the "The Red Eyes of Tom Boy" project.

I am very happy to see another platform working for Taiwan's agriculture appear, and to see that NewsMarket is working hard to connect groups interested in agricultural issues in various fields and positions. I look forward to the clustering that NewsMarket brings, and the energy generated after that clustering.