When heavy rains overwhelmed a landslide dam above the Mataian Wetland in September 2025, the floodwaters that tore through Guangfu Township in Hualien County left a landscape that looked, in the months that followed, much the same as before — the distant mountains still quiet, the paddy fields still reaching toward them in both directions. But the people who lived there knew what had happened, and the land itself carried the weight of it.
"The 2026 Piao Niao 197 Rift Valley Land Art Festival" (漂鳥197縱谷大地藝術季), organized by Taiwan's Soil and Water Conservation Bureau, has placed three major public installations at two sites in Guangfu: the Da Nong Da Fu flatlands and the Mataian Wetland. Running along Provincial Highway 197 through Hualien County's interior valley — a stretch of eastern Taiwan known for its rice fields, indigenous Amis communities, and some of the island's most dramatic mountain scenery — the festival has, in this cluster of works, made a deliberate choice. Rather than look away from the disaster, the artworks face it directly. Rather than mourn, they rebuild.
The three works form a loose itinerary that visitors can follow in sequence, each piece deepening the emotional register of the last: from collective labor, to human connection, to the land itself reaching back toward the light.
Shovels and Sacred Stones Honor Guangfu's Recovery
At the Da Nong Da Fu plain — a broad, managed flatland originally developed to support agricultural resettlement — artist Lin Chun-yung (林純用) has installed "Infinite Protection" (無限守護) in the open meadow among the wildflower fields.
The sculpture is built from shovels. Not single shovels, but a looping configuration of oversized ones, their handles interlocking and curving outward in three directions to form a continuous circular shape. The choice of material carries immediate weight for anyone who spent time in Guangfu after the floods: the shovel was everywhere — in the hands of residents clearing debris from their homes, in the hands of volunteers who came from across Taiwan to help. When Lin scales that tool up and braids dozens of them together, the work becomes a monument to that collective effort, an image of hands that never stopped moving.
The base of the sculpture draws on a second, older symbol. Three stones arranged in a triangle reference the traditional three-stone hearth (三石灶) used in homes of the Amis people — Taiwan's largest indigenous group, who have lived in the Rift Valley for generations and whose communities in Guangfu were among those hardest hit by the flooding. The hearth supported cooking pots, but it also supported the family: warmth, food, and the daily ritual of gathering together. Reinforcement bars wrapped in river pebbles complete the structure, holding natural material inside an industrial frame.
Taken together, *Infinite Protection* argues that recovering from a disaster means more than clearing rubble and rebuilding roads. It means holding on to what made a place feel like home in the first place.
Bamboo Figures at Sun Moon Pond Redefine Togetherness
Near the Sun Moon Pond (日月池) in Da Nong Da Fu, a second work asks a different kind of question. *Together* (同在), by Amis artist Adan Chen Chuan-rong (阿噹陳權榮), is a group of life-size human figures woven entirely from bamboo strips — and what makes the piece memorable is what the artist chose to leave out.
The figures stand in proximity, but they don't merge into one another. Between the interlaced bamboo, deliberate gaps remain throughout the weave, giving the sculpture room to breathe and suggesting something more nuanced than simply "people standing side by side." The work's implicit argument is that real companionship doesn't demand sameness or absolute closeness. What it demands is the willingness, while remaining a distinct person with your own distance and your own shape, to reach toward another and hold some of their weight.
As visitors walk slowly around the sculpture, the figures shift. From some angles they appear to embrace; from others, they seem to brace one another; from still others, they look like a quiet group of people keeping watch on a stretch of land they care about. The sculpture's meaning moves with you.
Bamboo, which bends under pressure but rarely breaks, and which becomes remarkably strong when woven into interlocking layers, is perhaps the perfect material for this kind of work — flexible in isolation, structural in combination.
Tim Norris's Floating Lotus Rises From Mataian's Flood Memory
The final stop on this itinerary is also the most dramatic, and the most specific to its location. The Mataian Wetland — a protected area known for its rich ecosystem and its traditional Amis fishing culture — was at the center of the September 2025 flooding. Standing at its lotus pond today, it's possible to sense how much recovery has already happened, and how much is still unfinished.
Into that pond, British artist Tim Norris has placed "Emerging" (湧現): a towering bamboo-woven lotus that rises approximately four meters above the water's surface. The structure's pentagonal form references the five elemental forces of Chinese cosmology — wood, fire, earth, metal, and water — while the bamboo, sourced locally from Hualien, carries its own symbolism: flexibility, resilience, and the capacity to regenerate after being cut back.
The lower section of the sculpture sits submerged; only the upper portion breaks the surface, catching light and casting reflections on the water. Sunlight filters through the gaps in the weave, and the mountain ridges and cloud formations around the wetland seem to enter the work through those openings. The effect — a form that appears neither fully submerged nor fully risen, still negotiating between the water below and the sky above — feels precisely right for a landscape in the middle of recovery.
"Emerging" was built collaboratively. Local craftspeople, Guangfu residents, and members of the indigenous community all contributed to its construction. Each length of bamboo carries, in that sense, a trace of the people who wove it — the specific knowledge of how to work the material, and the memory of having done this work together, in this place, in the year after the flood.
Original Article in Chinese （Related： 2026 East Rift Valley Land Art Festival | A Drive Through Art in Taitung's Rice Country ｜ Latest ）
