Rural labor becomes the new fashion: build it with gusto, construct your ideal
Text/Lu Yaozhong
Origins - Youth Liberates the Countryside
Rural Taiwan, its agriculture, and its farmers face all kinds of real pressures from around the globe, and the government has actively rolled out many related policies in the hope of changing Taiwan's "agricultural" predicament. Yet farmers to this day still labor to produce food for the people, sweating profusely as they quietly tend their fields. Facing the future, what more can they ask of life?
When did farmers' silhouettes begin to look so especially lonely and forlorn? When did the countryside become synonymous with remote decline? When did tending the fields through sun and rain for a few extra dollars of income mean that even having a patch of shade to rest in on the farm became a luxury in life?
From this came "Build It with Gusto, Construct Your Ideal" - the Field Art Work Team Grand Competition, in which the "Field Art Attack Team" will recruit passionate young people from across Taiwan, using the Tugou rural village in Houbi, Tainan as its base of action, and launch an artistic action of "Youth Liberates the Countryside" through in-village creation, helping farmers build installation art that serves as a field rest spot or shade structure, so that hardworking farmers can also elegantly cool off beside the fields after their labor! Cool off!
Creating a Rural Art Trend
The "Field Art Attack Team" is made up of a group of like-minded people from all over Taiwan who care about the countryside, including many professionals in fields such as art, architecture, imagery, literature, traditional crafts, space, community building, and ecology. In recent years they have planned many "art in the countryside" actions, emphasizing that "laboring in the countryside is a new fashion," and widely recruiting new young blood to join in going to the countryside and taking part in labor. Through the body they feel the joy and reflection that sweat brings, hoping to create a platform that gathers more professional strength, and attempting to realize the "art attack action" of turning farmland into art space, agricultural products into works of art, and farmers into life artists.
Starting from Zero - Youth Install Rural Art
The "Field Art Attack Team" will hold the "Build It with Gusto, Construct Your Ideal" field art work team grand competition - a farmland installation art action - from July 11 to July 17 of the 100th year of the Republic of China (2011). The event starts from "zero yuan" in raising funds, materials, tools, and willing young people, and has gained support from corporate figures such as the Tainan Enterprise Culture and Arts Foundation, the Lixian Education Foundation, Ms. Xu Lingling, chairwoman of the Kaohsiung Culture Love River Association, and Liyou Enterprise Co., Ltd.
The action takes the Tugou rural village in Houbi District, Tainan City as its base, selecting ten youth teams through a screening mechanism to enter the community. Each team is assigned a piece of farmland and begins a seven-working-day field art installation action. Just like a TV champion competition, each team must create installation art with "function" according to the farmland owner's "agricultural needs" (which might be an artistic farm hut, a rest platform, an artistic pavilion, elegant seating, or a farm produce trellis, etc.), and must carry out substantive design and set a creative theme based on limited resources or materials found on their own. Only after passing review and gaining the landowner's approval may they proceed with the actual build. In the end, one team is selected for the "Field Art Grand Prize."
It is hoped that through the event, civic strength will continue to be rallied, giving more passionate young people of Taiwan opportunities and physical space to devote themselves body and mind to the countryside, and promoting the trendy new social movement of "rural labor as the new fashion."