Jinshan No.14 is an art project about a house: a residence building commonly seen in the agricultural society in the early days of Taiwan; a playground by the rice field for the artist when he stayed with his grandparents during childhood; a decayed old house rich in the meaning of times; a one-floor thôo-kat-tshù (rammed-earth house) sitting in between fields at Yuanli, Miaoli, with earth-tone walling mixed with stalks and grains and a dark-gray pitched tile roof, which is said to be warm in winter and cool in summer.
The living memory regarding “thôo-kat-tshù” is perhaps something native city-dwellers lack. Even today, when new houses and skyscrapers (whether in city or the countryside) are seen everywhere, one can still see quite a few architectures like that as he/she roams in the countryside of Yuanli, Miaoli. Most of them seem to be occupied by none with collapsed roofs and fallen earth bricks surrounded by weeds. Only a few appear to still serve the functions of storage or leisure in the fields, with the walls reluctantly covered by cement. Occasionally by chance, one may find one or two thôo-kat-tshù that are well taken care of, which is erected upright and neat like the one-story house we might draw in childhood with a pitched roof and a door right in the center. (I wonder if the children nowadays still draw a house like that?) Meanwhile, these thôo-kat-tshù sporadically situated in the countryside of Taiwan, subtly reflecting the experiences of agricultural villages, appear to be more of a living and cultural imagination that is serene yet out of time.
“A house dwelled by none ruins fast.” “Thôo-kat-tshù of Liu’s Family” that has seen changes over three generations of the family, virtually ruined, has been strange to the contemporary everyday life. It is an architecture ought to be preserved, yet without any mean to preservation, according to friends and family as well as neighbors as they talked about it. Indeed, from the in-situ materials and the construction supported by neighbors to the spatial planning inside out the building, thôo-kat-tshù is not only a commoner’s building of the Han people that is fading away but also a combination of the economy, culture, industry, labor, and living memories of the early agricultural society in Taiwan. Nevertheless, in the face of such architecture, which is hard to be listed as cultural heritage for preservation and is “deteriorating” owing to the natural and circumstantial changes on the island, should we preserve it or not? How can we preserve it? Or, the question is perhaps what to preserve and to preserve what?
In the face of such perplexing “real estate,” Liu chose to address it via art. In 2016, this thôo-kat-tshù transformed from a registered building at “No.14, Jinshan” into an artifact named “Jinshan No.14” (“Jinshan” is an old place name, generally referring to the mountain on the outskirt of Yuanli Township, Miaoli.) Either the old building’s roof tiles, earth bricks, and structural materials or the interior ornaments, posters, daily articles, and earth-made Chalybion hives, as long as they are part of thôo-kat-tshù, they would be collected by Liu Chien Wei and assigned as materials for the following research and production of Jinshan No.14. To date, the house aged over a century has experienced the artist’s repeated “rehearsal” – collection, destruction, restoration, and reproduction. Thus, it transformed from the house that contained personal histories and the commoner’s building that documented the agricultural society into the “contextual artifact” for public and private experiences display.
How can we preserve culture? How can we archive experiences? What is the classification system beneath the values of artifacts we recognize? Themed with the archivability and unarchivability of cultural content and life experience, how can “Jinshan No.14” in the Special Gallery of Chiayi Art Museum in 2022 represent the scenes in memories via art contexts? Or, perhaps what Liu Chien Wei introduced is not merely an art project but also a “semi-art/true archiving” artifact preserving endeavor.
TSOU Ting