The southern end of Taiwan's East Rift Valley is where most visitors first enter the corridor. Driving north on Provincial Highway 9 from Taitung City, the Central Mountain Range rises to the left and the Coastal Mountain Range closes in from the right, and between them the valley opens up into some of the most productive rice farmland in the country. Luye, Guanshan, and Chishang — three townships strung along this stretch of road — are already well known to domestic travelers.
“2026 East Rift Valley Land Art Festival” (漂鳥197縱谷大地藝術季) has given international visitors a new reason to take this drive slowly.
Six installations are scattered across these townships, placed in grasslands, wetlands, rice paddies, and at least one abandoned building. The works span a wide emotional range — philosophical, ecological, mysterious, and unabashedly playful — and none of them imposes on its setting. Finding them requires paying attention to the landscape, which is, in a sense, exactly what the festival asks of everyone who enters the valley.
Two International Artists Interrogate Belonging on Luye's Grassland
Luye Township is best known to visitors as a paragliding destination; the broad terrace of Longtian (龍田) is where gliders land after launching from the high plateau above. On that same open grassland, Turkish artist Mehmet Ali Uysal has placed Home (家) — a structure built from nested, layered spaces, one interior folded inside another, like a set of architectural rooms that each contain a smaller version of themselves.
Uysal is not making a literal statement about architecture. The work asks a question that most people carry without fully articulating: what is the thing we mean when we say "home"? The answer, the piece suggests, is not a building but a feeling — the particular quality of safety that comes from being fully known, from being able to stop performing and simply be. On an open field with the mountains receding in every direction, that sense of boundlessness gives the enclosed, nested structure an unexpected poignancy.
A short distance away, British-Egyptian artist Sam Shendi has installed Between Us (我們之間) — a stack of brightly colored geometric volumes that climbs upward in a configuration that looks, at first glance, unstable. The colors are bold and the angles are off; the shapes appear to lean on one another in ways that shouldn't hold. But they do hold, precisely because of the mutual support. Shendi seems to be making an argument about the physics of human connection: that the relationships we form with people who seem entirely unlike us are often the ones that keep both parties upright.
American Artist's Wounded Plant Redefines Outsiders in Xinliang Wetland
A few kilometers from the landing field, Luye's Xinliang Wetland (新良濕地) — a protected low-lying area of grass, water, and open sky — hosts the festival's most psychologically complex work in this section of the route. American artist Danielle Leigh Ranck's Stranger in the Field (田野間的異邦者) rises from the wetland like a plant from some other ecosystem entirely: its twisted stems unfamiliar, its proportions wrong for this latitude, its origin clearly elsewhere.
The strangeness is deliberate and carefully constructed. Hollow voids have been worked into the stems — not accidents but built-in absences, representing the incompleteness and accumulated wounds that are part of how any living thing actually grows. The plant's outer layers appear to be shedding, with new growth visible pushing out from beneath. At the very top, a single eye looks upward.
For visitors who have ever felt out of place in an environment they were trying to fit into, the work carries an immediate message: even marked by difference and damage, a life can still grow into something singular and whole. The wetland backdrop, with its open sky and undisturbed grasses, gives the sculpture space to make that statement without crowding it.
Dragonflies and Mysterious Signals Transform Guanshan's Rice Landscape
Heading north into Guanshan Township (關山鎮), the rice fields of Deghao Village (德高里) come into view — wide, flat, and wind-moved in the particular way that valley rice fields are, the green surface rippling in slow waves. Into that setting, Malaysian artist Zhu Weilong (朱威龍) has installed Dragonflies Know the Rain (稻間蜻蜓知雨水): a kinetic work powered entirely by wind and water, in which rice straw components sway from side to side while dragonfly forms rotate and spin above the paddy.
Dragonflies have served as a traditional weather indicator in East Asian farming communities for generations — their low flight patterns signal approaching rain. Zhu has taken that ancient ecological knowledge and built it into a moving sculpture: wind and water work in relay, each one handing motion off to the other, recreating the rhythm of a farming community's attention to the sky. The work is light on its feet and easy to enjoy without any prior knowledge, but rewards those who pause to consider what it's actually encoding.
From the rice fields, a turn toward the township center leads to a corrugated tin-roof building thatLi Wei-mu (李維睦)has transformed into something strange and compelling. Airborne Objects — They Were Here (空降之所－他們來過) fills the abandoned structure with floating forms, towers, figure-scale ant-people, and reflective mirrors that scatter images of the surrounding sky and fields through the interior. The effect is of a place where something briefly landed, left evidence of its visit, and then departed quietly. It is the most unsettling work on the southern route, and one of the most memorable.
A Solar-Powered Flying Cat Invites Travelers to Dream in Chishang
Chishang (池上) is where the valley feels widest and the sky closest. The township's rice paddies have become one of the most photographed agricultural landscapes in Taiwan, and they attract visitors in every season. Among those fields, artist Ah-lei Ye Xin-hong (阿咧葉信泓) has installed Flying Cat (飛天貓): a sculpture of a cat in flight, described in the work's own mythology as having traveled from an imaginary planet called Feifei, running on solar energy and communicating through something the artist calls "meow-electric signals."
The work has no interest in being difficult or ambiguous. It is simply a large, whimsical cat, hovering over a rice paddy, inviting every passing traveler to slow down and make up a story. In a festival that has asked visitors to reckon with flood damage, geological time, cultural displacement, and the mystery of belonging, Flying Cat arrives at the end of the Taitung route as a kind of deliberate counterweight — a reminder that the capacity for play and the capacity for imagination are themselves a form of resilience.
