Series: Treading on Thin Ice
Title: Collapsing Landscape: No One Surface the Same as Any Other
Year: 2023
Medium: installation | three-channel video, 2.1 sound system, 3-D printed sculptures, discarded found objects, paint
Dimension: approx. 320 sq ft
Venue: Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei
Read the curatorial concept on TIVA 2023
This series of works contemplates human conditions under progressive catastrophes resulting from social issues and climate change. By employing the concept of “landscape” comprised of traces of human history, visualized as a battleground and an extension of the human body, Lin explores the conception of a “post-landscape” where nature, human activities, digital media, and materiality intersect. It also examines circumstances in the changing environment to which human beings are forced to constantly adapt and respond.
This three-channel video installation, titled Collapsing Landscape: No One Surface the Same as Any Other, employs video, sound, generative visual, sculpture, and text to reimagine where we, as humans, stand amid our changing land. The major footage and sound of calving glaciers were recorded during Lin’s field research with The Arctic Circle expedition around the Svalbard archipelago, Norway, in 2022. Lin explores the notions of and interactions among natural disasters, collapsed landscapes, deformed structures, social violence, trauma, memories of loss, reconstructions, and fragments and transmutes the abstract concept into a perceivable audio-visual built environment.
The video installation also probes the interrelations among three-channel video, sound, sculptures, and text excerpts recomposed from poetry by Laurie Glover, an American writer who wrote poems during their expedition in the High Arctic region. Part of Lin’s video composition is inspired by Glover’s concept of “layered fragments” and the “inconstancy of phenomena” captured in her poems. The sculptures in front of the video projections will be composed of 3-D–printed animal bones and discarded artificial materials collected locally. They represent Lin’s contradictory experience upon seeing modern objects, trash, and driftwood carried by arctic currents stranded on the remote northern shores in Svalbard, which had long been known as “no man’s land.”
While we try to understand the landscape, history, and climate change through our observations and research on glaciers, ice, and the objects we encountered, the ice continues to break up, move, and recombine.
