Taiwan Today

An industrial designer by trade is using traditional bamboo craft techniques in contemporary installation art.

Last December 180 budding and blossoming flowers stood tall in an eye-catching display at Daan Forest Park (DFP) in Taipei City. Visitors moving in for a closer look were surprised to discover they were fashioned from delicate bamboo strips. The flowerbed was the work of Taipei-based Gridesign Studio, which used over 60,000 bamboo slivers to create the art installation. Weaving rigid bamboo into gentle, rounded flower shapes was an expression of gratitude commissioned by a local charitable foundation as a homage to front-line workers combating COVID-19. Known as “Thank You Bouquet,” it is now displayed at the Ministry of Culture (MOC)-administered National Center for Traditional Arts (NCTA) in northeastern Taiwan’s Yilan County.
 

NCTA preserves Taiwan’s artisan heritage, including bamboo weaving, by offering a platform and careers to makers. Decades ago, bamboo was shaped into household objects such as baskets, chairs, cupboards and tables as well as items ranging from agricultural tools to children’s toys. However, since these goods became mass-produced, the craft has fallen out of favor. Gridesign’s founder Lin Ching-ke (林靖格), who holds a master’s degree from the Department of Industrial Design at Taipei-based Shih Chien University (USC), wants to revive the use of bamboo ware in daily life. In addition to innovative furniture, he creates large-scale artwork like the one at DFP. “Such installations have a distinct visual appeal allowing viewers to freely associate meanings,” Lin said. “They can be presented in more flexible contexts than household paraphernalia, helping demonstrate contemporary applications of bamboo.”
 

Lin became fascinated by bamboo while learning hand working skills at the MOC-overseen National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute in central Taiwan’s Nantou County as part of his graduate study program at USC. The course passed techniques in danger of decline down to the next generation, Lin recalled. “Bamboo isn’t a readily available material nowadays and people tend to know little about it,” he said. “If beginners are just taught to make small utensils in a traditional style, they soon lose interest.”

Imaginative Range

The artist pointed out that there is mature command of clay, glass and stone in Western art, and bamboo is likewise a culturally representative material. “An affectionate connection to bamboo still lingers in many Taiwanese hearts,” he said. “Familiarity and emotional links lend strength to bamboo as a means of artistic expression.” According to Lin, it boasts both grass- and wood-like qualities, giving it a rich range. Bamboo is malleable enough to weave a basket yet strong enough to construct a house, and it grows in an array of heights and diameters, with some species large enough to be made into drums or rice containers. Such a wide range of properties creates potential for imagination, Lin said. Bamboo is among the fastest growing plants, with local varieties like Moso and Makino providing durable, resilient wood suitable for both construction and craftwork. However, the preparation of bamboo prior to use is a painstaking job and poses a major challenge for aspiring artisans. “Bamboo’s hollow culm is an irregular shape, so it can’t be easily cut into regular sized blocks like timber,” Lin said.
 

It is a complex process to transform the harvested plant into sheets and strips like those used for the DFP exhibit. This work took Lin, together with four other Gridesign members, five months to complete. If they had begun from scratch by preparing the bamboo strips themselves, it would have taken two to three months longer. “We know how to do the job and we used to do it ourselves,” Lin said. However, such preparation is now contracted out to other workshops and factories, mostly in central and southern Taiwan. This outsourcing enhances efficiency in actual creation at Gridesign, while also helping develop and maintain a healthy local bamboo industry. “Division of labor is a crucial part of an effective business chain, hence our concentration on modern representations of the traditional craft through contemporary design concepts and subject matter,” Lin said.
 

In a reflection on his move from New Taipei City’s more industrial Banqiao District to Taipei’s most northern Beitou District, with its hot springs and mountain views, Lin created an installation titled “Listen, the Swallows Are Talking.” For the gallery exhibition, Lin created an array of barn swallows swooping and perching amid pared-down images of local architecture and cultural symbols such as shop signs, temple lanterns and even CCTV cameras. These familiar seasonal visitors are commonly seen nesting under eaves or storefronts, and the concept was inspired by his own life in the new locale.
 

In 2019, Lin was invited to exhibit at the annual Zhuangwei Dune Land Art Festival in Yilan for the first time. The event is co-organized by the county government and Tourism Bureau under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. For this, Lin launched his “Firework” installation, setting up dozens of parasol-shaped structures interwoven into two- and three-dimensional compositions. There was even an added audible component in the cracking sound made by bamboo as it split due to temperature changes. A similar design on a smaller scale dubbed “Firecracker” was unveiled in 2021 at the Taipei headquarters of a prominent international casualwear brand to celebrate its grand reopening following renovations.

Material Elements

The second edition of the Zhuangwei event saw the unveiling of Gridesign’s “The Season of Wind,” a visualization of elemental power composed of thousands of densely packed bamboo shafts arching up over sandy soil. “The more we find out about the properties of bamboo and the methods to make the most of it, the more we can freely explore diverse creative representation,” Lin said.
 

The artist draws inspiration from traditional bamboo items like children’s toys. For the permanent installation “When Mountains Meet the Ocean” established at a teahouse in downtown Taipei, over 1,000 units of a simple but powerful bamboo-copter, also called a bamboo dragonfly, were arranged with the help of digital simulation. The massed ranks of copter blades and stems evoke silhouettes of mountains and ocean waves characteristic of the owner’s hometown in eastern Taiwan’s Taitung County.
 

Wanting to popularize bamboo in a new generation, Lin and his team members, whom he recruited and trained himself, introduce new dexterity and perspectives. The artist believes bamboo can stay true to its native roots while enjoying a rebirth as a sustainable homegrown resource. “Bamboo is an endlessly fascinating material for students and practitioners interested in fusing tradition and innovation,” Lin said. “It’s a medium at the junction of past and future, practical and abstract. It’s an enduring relationship for an artist.”


Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw