Hongmaogang Cultural Park and ‘Adagio – Love River Forest’ by the artist Ming Hun-Yen.

One thing I have noticed in Taiwan is a heritage policy that deals incredibly sensitively with ‘nature and decay’. When I first visited in 2012 and had the opportunity to travel around a bit, I saw Anping Tree House [安平樹屋] in Tainan, where banyan trees have grown in and around an abandoned warehouse complex. Spiny tendrils wrestle crumbling red brick. Instead of cutting down the trees and demolishing the dilapidated building, it was decided to build a walkway over and around them.

Something like this policy for the preservation can be found in Hongmaogang Cultural Park [紅毛港文化園區] at the ocean edge, in south east Kaohsiung. When the old fishing village of Hongmaogang had to be relocated to make way for Kaohsiung Port International Container Terminal in 2007 somebody decided that rather than knock down all of the old buildings they would keep some of the facades, strange modern relics of a recent past. Most of the ‘ruins’ are not all that old, built in the mid-20th Century but they have been preserved as if they were ancient remains, with support struts, partial ‘reconstructions’, and footprint markings. Portico columns are positioned together in a row, in a collector’s display. In fact, the closest experience I have had to wandering around these ghost building fragments is walking through the remains of Ancient Rome or Pompei. The comparison is exaggerated but it is the best that I can do to describe what there doesn’t seem to be any other precedent for. Perhaps another way of thinking about these strange half-buildings is that they are an expanded series of ‘theatre flats’ flown in from an invisible rigging in the sky.

The former industrial conveyor belt that transported shipments of coal to the Taipower Plant was also kept and is now become a ‘Skywalk’ with views over the whole park. The effect is somewhere between a contemporary art installation, heritage, and a theatre set. It sparks a rich imaginative encounter.

On the same day, my visiting friend and I went to Dayi Park [大義公園] in the popular Pier 2 area, further west along the harbour. There we got to climb up ‘Adagio – Love River Forest’ by the artist Ming Hun-Yen [顏名宏] which is a spiral walkway, something like a double helix, which winds up and around a giant banyan tree. There is no intervention on the tree itself, it is simply a scaffold that works around and between the branches, so that you can ‘climb’ the tree, experience being in, and then above, its canopy.

It is such a simple idea, very smartly executed; a beautiful, gentle poetry. Sometimes, a shift in perspective is all that you need.