Text and interview by Cheng Yu-Tung

Linyuan Industrial Park, with its geographical advantage of neighboring Gaoping River, the Taiwan Strait, and the Kaohsiung International Airport, was listed as one of the Ten Major Construction Projects in 1975, laying the foundation for the petrochemical industry in southern Taiwan while also writing a new chapter for the economic development of Kaohsiung. Perhaps, some people’s memories about Kaohsiung would suddenly go blank at this point and skip right into the chapter of its focus on Asia New Bay Area. Yet, the broad environment has, in fact, been constantly penetrating locals’ lifestyle and life in general in Linyuan, without Chang Cheng-Chun’s (1996–) being an exception.

At home, or holiday family gatherings in particular, Chang’s male relatives would always talk about everything that might have happened in all those corporations in the industrial park; at school, Chang himself received the CPC (formerly Chinese Petroleum Corporation) scholarship six times. The industrial system was tightly woven into his upbringing. It would have been attributed to destiny if he were already used to it, but because of his ever so untainted eyes, he is able to see the odd and the unjust in the practice of public power, the unfair and the unreasonable in the seemingly justified policy. He has created a just enough distance between his hometown and artistic interpretation. With such emotional detachment, he also makes viewers become the clear-sighted Other—an approach as clever and introverted as he personally is, but also more convincing than ever.

Firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, tea… a person is constructed by all such daily necessities, but their thoughts can travel to fire, water, soil, and air. And these elements that construct the world have been evidently reflected in his creation for the past seven years ever since his university days. Here are some of the examples below.

Fire: To Boil Water
        While Chang rarely directly thematizes “fire,” this element is actually highly relevant to his creative thinking. Given the surroundings he grew up with, Chang began to contemplate whether economic development is a quid pro quo for environmental contamination, which later developed into his first hometown-related work in 2017—his first installation titled To Boil Water. He boiled water with gas that was meant to be a giveback from CPC to local residents. Once the boiling point was reached, the lid started to flip open and shut vigorously. It resembled the conflicting entanglement between him and his hometown, as well as his fellow townspeople. More specifically, while the social welfare provided by the state-owned enterprise has indeed made positive impact on their life, it has also made him alerted to the intervention of public power in people’s everyday life. Rooted in this context, his creation frequently shuttles along the blurred boundary between the system, resources, and humanity.

Water: Pipe Mania and The Adventure of Getting Water from the Reservoir
On another note, Chang’s family lives close to the seaside, so many delightful memories were created by the sea. Yet, a lot of times, the broader atmosphere may not be as stable as the sea level, and the ambient rattling makes people’s bodies oscillate accordingly. Such noise of water pumps, along with pipes used in fish farms, create a levee-like wall of some sort of man-made intervention with its spotlight-stealing existence. With a wide stretch of ocean lying in front, one can also clearly perceive “streams and streams of ocean” flowing unsettlingly in the pipes behind.

In fact, this is a common scene found in the area between Chiayi and Pingtung. The seawater pumps were first introduced when the government banned fish farms from extracting groundwater in order to prevent land subsidence. However, the new system running through existing seawalls also affects local drainage, which in turn raises concerns of flooding and structural damage. Based on this context, Chang went on-site and picked a multitude of pipes of various calibers, lengths, thicknesses, as well as different colors and markings made by fisheries they belonged to. Each pipe resembled a moment in life in one’s memory, and during the process of piecing them altogether, Chang could also comb through his mind and tidy up his thoughts.

More practically speaking, the process referred to welding. Back then, because the commissioned welder could not help with rupture repair, he taught Chang how to use the welding machine. As Chang took over the task, the process and movement in his mind became more concrete than ever. At the same time, the process highlighted the importance of retrieving a balance and, in turn, turned into a push-pull or mending sort of relational expression between civilization and nature. And that was what his 2023 work, Pipe Mania, was about; the work was exhibited in Absolute Space for the Arts, an experimental venue of contemporary art in Tainan.

Soil: For Mount Hung-Hsia and A Racket Delivered by Sea Shipment
In earlier construction stages of Linyuan Industrial Park, certain areas required land reclamation from the lake, for which Mount Hung-Hsia was chosen as the source of filling materials and thus gradually flattened; Chang’s grandfather and father were involved in this historic event. Later, the mountain grew taller back not because of natural recovery but that the location was assigned as a disposal site of construction surplus soil, namely, a landfill. Having combed through online data and his family’s oral history, Chang made a trig point with sand and rock taken from Mount Hung-Hsia and left it on-site as his tribute to the long-gone summit underfoot.

Instead of video documenting or only leaving the trig point, Chang commissioned Ning Lu to create comics for the project. This modest simulation was more of a restoration of the present moment, providing his own interpretation of the current situation and the time when the trig point was made while juxtaposing and then integrating his grandfather’s duty of delivering materials with dump carts into his presentation. The low-resolution nature of comics made it difficult for the viewer to tell how truthful the content was and, in turn, offered the viewer an easy access to such a heavy issue. It also implied an emotionally detached tease about the sad disregard of the government, enterprises, and other people in general.

The work was exhibited at the Taipei Art Awards in 2022 in a space whose floor-to-ceiling windows happened to reveal the construction site of the new collection storeroom of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which served as an unexpected site-specific comparison. Chang then negotiated with the museum and got permission to slightly move the display shelf of the comics to again reflect the unseen but constant change of the land.

In 2024, Chang expanded his range of exploration to Nangan, Matsu and created A Racket Delivered by Sea Shipment. On the offshore island that lacks material resources and evening entertainments, he found and picked up a slipper washed ashore all the way from China before turning it into an easy-to-use table tennis racket. The table tennis table was placed in a former military post now used as a military rest house. Between both players, one faced towards the direction of Taiwan, and the other, China. Yet, the presentation exuded more of serenity than a sense of crisis while the experience triggers a different perspective of reflection in the face of the current border situation.

Air: Negative Protest, A 300k Fine for Flying Drones Here, and The R&D Private
Looking back, one of Chang’s early works, Negative Protest, also tapped into the issue of air pollution in 2017. He used an infrared detector to examine the air; when unsafe levels of PM1.0 and PM2.5 particles were detected, the horn would be activated, and the air would be stored into a balloon. With each balloon marked with its time of generation, the exhibition room was eventually filled with such balloons as well. This usually invisible kind of air pollution was thereby visualized through visual and auditory perceptions. Serving as a wake-up call for today’s world, the installation forced us to stare straight into the sense of urgency, giving us nowhere to escape.

On the other hand, A 300k Fine for Flying Drones Here followed the context of The Adventure of Getting Water from the Reservoir mentioned above, also serving as a spinoff from For Mount Hung-Hsia. The right of attribution of public goods again turned into question marks in Chang’s mind, but this time, the focus was shifted from lake water to the sky. It would have been reasonable if the entire area above the industrial park were regulated as a no-fly zone, but it is now confusing that only the area above the CPC Corporation forbids drone flying, together with some arbitrarily assigned fish farms, farmlands, and nearby public roads. Chang thus used a drone to record the actual situation of him flying it along this ambiguous borderline, capturing the tension between CPC staff’s close watch and the drone’s space of freedom. This approach was an attempt to challenge the still questionable man-made system.

In recent years, Chang further pushed the boundary of his creation to the level of national borders. Especially in 2024, when he was serving in the army after the completion of his Master’s degree, he got influenced by the severity of the Russo-Ukrainian War and started to develop The R&D Private based on an opportunity to research propaganda shells. And with the propaganda shell, he wanted it to provide a portable dining table, as well as European, American, and Japanese fast food, drinks, and snacks among others after it exploded. His skillful handling of the mentality of each perspective simply resorted to humanity, calling for our inclination to war-weariness.
 

Conclusion
Historically, the Industrial Revolution posed an impact on people’s life, resulting in the emergence of the Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris in the 19^th century; the widely valued deindustrialized aesthetics was established during this time. After the Second World War, the Düsseldorf School from Germany advocated complete self-detachment and the industrialized calm that symbolized the progression of civilization; although these two concepts are still celebrated by today’s art market, they used to oppose each other when it came to the division of industrial society and artistic interpretation. And between these two historic events, other artists like Anselm Kiefer and Ai Weiwei proposed multiple explanations to discuss taboos and conflicts; their approach, however, could easily turn into emotional or aggressive expression when later generations fail to practice it cautiously enough.