空間故事與美學之用：寶藏巖泡茶照相館

Abstract

The concept of "art's intervention into the community" has come into vogue in the cultural policies and exhibition projects in Taiwan since the 1990s. This shows the widespread expectation of art's capacity to revitalize derelict places and impoverished communities. This essay will focus on the Treasure Hill village in Taipei, which has been at the intersection of community-based art, illegal housing, and urban planning discourses for a decade. It discusses the conditions and strategies that enable art to enter a community against the constant threat of demolition, and foregrounds the planned Treasure Hill Artivist CO-UP as the contested terrain of different ideologies. The paper first analyzes the popular representations of the picturesque village and the sentimental discourse which construct the unique imagery and historical significance of the place. Then I will discuss the activist art program envisioned by the city government and the urban reform organization and the residents' suspicion and indifference toward it. I concentrate on the dialectic of aesthetic autonomy and instrumentality manifested by the three-year Treasure Hill Tea + Photo Project in which Wei-Li Yeh, Ho-Jang Liu, Yu-Xing Wu, and a dozen of university students collaboratively produce four phases of photography and environmental renovation: Portrait, Delineations, Trash, Garden and Archive. I apply Michel de Certeau's idea of spatial practice to explore how this site-specific art enriches the textuality, materiality, and aesthetic functions of a place with an everyday tactic beyond the dominant logic of tourism and activism. The project shapes an expanded field of found objects, preserves cultural memory, and enunciates the body in images and discourses