Reborn Tree Series: Collective

Participating in a residency program abroad in 2014, the artist moved from his lovely homeland to a new environment where the seasonal change is more distinct than that in Taiwan. He was shocked by the distinct and rhythmic changes in the appearance of everything in the loops of the four seasons as well as day and night. In the meantime, human civilization flourishes with the advances in digital technology. The natural environment and the digitalized human civilization not only co-exist in different rhythms but also condition each other.

Employing psychedelic visual language, the form of this work presents his previous contemplation on the relationship between bio-materials and artificial technological media. It implicitly demonstrates the controlled demise and rebirth of things, just as what Gabriel García Márquez stated in One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Things have a life of their own. It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” The artist adopts wild plants and flowers as the creative material, presenting their life cycle from flourishing to withering. The wild plants are juxtaposed with the unapproachable technological media that follow a fixed frequency and function in the digital world composed of 1 and 0. The machines instead create an organic state with their collective ordered motions. In the end, our quotidian existence becomes the result of collective hypnosis.