Art as Environment: Wu Mali’s Watersheds, Kitchens, and One Cubic Centimeter of Land

This episode introduces the practice of Taiwanese artist Wu Mali （吳瑪悧）as an early anchor for regenerative artivism in East Asia. Moving from a polluted suburban creek at the edge of Taipei to river basins, a former naval kitchen on Cijin Island, and finally a project focused on one cubic centimeter of soil, the episode traces how Wu treats art as environmental infrastructure rather than isolated objects.

Listeners will hear how Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at Plum Tree Creek turned a neglected waterway into a watershed commons through walking, mapping, school programs, and breakfast gatherings with residents and hydrologists; how river projects such as By the River, On the River, Of the River and Taipei Tomorrow as a Lake Again reframe Taipei as a vulnerable floodplain; how Cijin Kitchen and Cijin’s tongue use cooking and storytelling in a former naval dormitory to surface maritime labor, migration, and coastal change; and how To Reconstruct 1 cm³ of Land, It Requires a Centennial foregrounds soil timescales and micro-acts of cultivation. Across these cases, the episode situates Wu’s work within ecofeminist, community-based strategies that link environmental repair to everyday care, pedagogy, and local governance.

Keywords

Wu Mali; Taiwan; socially engaged art; community art; eco-art; environmental humanities; regenerative artivism; regenerative aesthetics; ecofeminism; watershed commons; Plum Tree Creek; Cijin Kitchen; Cijin’s tongue; To Reconstruct 1 cm³ of Land, It Requires a Centennial; river city; climate adaptation; soil and land; art and governance; public pedagogy

Key references

Bamboo Curtain Studio. “Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at Plum Tree Creek.” Project documentation. Bamboo Curtain Studio Website. https://bambooculture.com/en/project/2004.html. 

ecoartspace. “Member Spotlight: Mali Wu.” Online feature. ecoartspace Blog. https://ecoartspace.org/Blog/13030578. 

Goto, Reiko, Margaret Shiu, and Wu Mali. “Ecofeminism: Art as Environment – A Cultural Action at Plum Tree Creek.” Women Environmental Artists Directory (WEAD) Magazine. 2014. https://directory.weadartists.org/plum-tree-creek-action/.

Harff, Amy Spencer. “Artist Series: Wu Mali, The Godmother of Taiwan’s Socially Engaged Art.” Eurasia Review. Last modified August 3, 2021. https://www.eurasiareview.com/03082021-artist-series-wu-mali-the-godmother-of-taiwans-socially-engaged-art-analysis/.

Tung, Wei-Hsiu. “Art and Aesthetic Environmental Awakening at Plum Tree Creek.” The Newsletter (International Institute for Asian Studies), no. 76 (2017): 30.

Tung, Wei-Hsiu. “From Social Art Practice to Environmental Aesthetic Awakening and Civil Engagement: The Case Study of Cijin Kitchen.” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, nos. 2–3 (2020): 307–324.

Wu, Mali and Bamboo Curtain Studio. “Art as Environment – A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek.” Case summary for the Taishin Arts Award. https://www.taishinart.org.tw/en/art-award-year-detail/2012/463. 

Zheng, Bo. “An Interview with Wu Mali.” FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, no. 4 (2016). https://field-journal.com/no4/an-interview-with-wu-mali.

Special note: Chinese names in this episode follow local convention, with the family name given first and the personal name second.

Transcript

You are listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities.

In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures.

Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

Today, we travel to northern Taiwan, to a modest creek at the edge of Taipei’s metropolitan sprawl, and to an artist who has spent decades insisting that art belongs in the thick of public life.

She is Wu Mali （吳瑪悧）.

If you follow socially engaged art in Taiwan, you have almost certainly heard her name. Since the 1990s, Wu has been at the forefront of experiments that bring together art, community organizing, feminism, and environmental politics. Her projects have unfolded in factory dormitories, village squares, schoolyards, wetlands, a suburban creek, a harbor kitchen, and even in the smallest unit of land: one cubic centimeter of soil. 

In this episode, I want to walk with you through four interconnected projects:

• Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at Plum Tree Creek, in northern Taiwan
• River projects that ask Taipei to see itself again as a floodplain
• Cijin Kitchen and Cijin’s tongue, based in a former naval kitchen in the south
• And finally, a soil work titled To Reconstruct 1 cm³ of Land, It Requires a Centennial

Together, they move from water to kitchen to soil, and they give us a very concrete sense of what regenerative artivism can look like on the ground.

Born in Taipei in 1957, Wu Mali grew up under martial law. She first studied German language and literature at Tamkang University before pursuing her graduate degree in sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts from 1982 to 1986. This blend of European conceptual rigor and material training became the foundation for her critical methodology, ultimately leading her to transition from traditional sculpture to socially engaged art practice in Taiwan.

By the early 1990s, she was moving away from conventional object-based work toward community-based projects: installations built from women’s bed sheets, performances that foregrounded women’s bodies, participatory projects in neighborhoods undergoing rapid change. Over time, her focus widened from gender and labor to environmental questions, but always through the lens of everyday life and care.

A key institutional partner in this story is Bamboo Curtain Studio, founded in 1995 by curator Hsiao Li-Hung in Zhuwei, at the edge of the Tamsui River. Bamboo Curtain converted old chicken sheds into an art residency and community hub, and over the years it became one of Taiwan’s most important spaces for socially engaged and ecological art.

Wu’s collaboration with Bamboo Curtain Studio is central to what we will talk about today. It is also a reminder that regenerative artivism relies on long-term infrastructures that rarely make headlines: modest buildings, archives, kitchens, and relationships that hold projects over many years. 

When I walked through Bamboo Curtain Studio in early 2021, in its winding-down phase, that was very clear. The space was mostly empty; plants were taking over the paths. Inside, boxes of project documents and artworks were waiting to be transported. It felt like a living archive: tired, but also saturated with the memory of countless experiments in art and community.

Among those experiments, Plum Tree Creek project stands out.

Plum Tree Creek is a small tributary that runs through Zhuwei, a suburb in New Taipei City. Older residents remember drinking from it, watering crops, washing clothes. With urbanization, the creek was gradually channelized and polluted. Household sewage and gray water flowed into the same channel. Concrete embankments cut it off from surrounding life. For many residents, it ceased to be a creek and became an ugly drainage ditch you tried not to notice.

Around 2009, Wu and a group of artists based at Bamboo Curtain Studio launched Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at Plum Tree Creek. On paper, the project aimed to help the Zhuwei neighborhood understand their creek, which had undergone dramatic change. On the ground, it meant something more ambitious: treating this neglected waterway as a shared laboratory, a watershed commons— basically a shared resource that residents, farmers, and local officials began to take care of together.

The project developed several interlocking strands.

First, ecological education. Artists and educators worked with local schools to create classes, workshops, and field trips focused on the creek itself. Children learned its course, its species, and its pollution sources. They drew maps, followed hidden segments under roads, and made small installations. Importantly, these were not side activities. The children’s drawings and maps became central tools for shifting how the whole community saw the creek.

Second, walking and mapping with residents. Wu and her team organized public walks where neighbors traced the creek’s route, peered into culverts, and tried to understand how domestic plumbing connected to the watershed. Large hand-drawn maps in community spaces slowly filled up with residents’ annotations: informal paths, vegetable plots, illegal discharge points, places where people remembered catching fish as children.

Third, participatory planning. Instead of leaving the future of the creek entirely to engineers and officials, the project convened residents, hydrologists, environmental officers, and planners to discuss very concrete questions: how to separate sewage from stormwater, where paths could run, how to deal with flood risk. Through workshops and public meetings, residents articulated their own visions for an environment fit for future living along the creek.

And then there was Breakfast at Plum Tree Creek, the strand that most people now remember.

On weekend mornings, residents were invited to cook and eat together by the creek, using seasonal food from local farmers. Guests came from across Taipei, from the art world, from other communities doing environmental work.

If you picture it, it is not a protest scene. There are folding tables, portable stoves, baskets of vegetables, the smell of soup, the clink of chopsticks, the chatter of children. Underneath all that, the persistent sound of water moving past.

At these breakfasts, farmers talked about droughts and changing rainfall. Elders shared memories of a cleaner creek. Children pointed to plastic tangled in the reeds. Hydrologists explained how the sewage system worked in everyday language. People ate, listened, argued, and gradually decided what they wanted for this place.

In other words, the breakfasts quietly reprogrammed public space. The creek was no longer just the back of things, a place for pipes and trash. It became a shared table, a site of what we might call public pedagogy. Domestic labor, often feminized and overlooked, moved to the center of environmental politics: without the work of cooking and hosting, there was no forum.

Over several years, the project drew in dozens of organizations and many participants. In 2013, it received the Taishin Arts Award, Taiwan’s most prestigious art prize, explicitly for its combination of environmental activism and cultural practice. But on the ground, the story did not end with the award. Some of the practices continued. Zhuwei eventually invested in sewage separation so household wastewater no longer flowed directly into the creek. The water is still not pristine, but it is visible again, and people argue about it. That matters.

For regenerative artivism, Plum Tree Creek is a key case. It shows art not as commentary on an environmental problem, but as a way of reorganizing how a community governs its watershed, with children, elders, farmers, experts, and officials all in the mix. 

Plum Tree Creek is part of a wider arc in Wu’s work. Alongside this suburban project, she and her collaborators developed river-focused public art processes with titles that are often translated as By the River, On the River, Of the River and Taipei Tomorrow as a Lake Again. 

These projects stretch the creek’s lessons to the metropolitan scale. The basic question is simple but unsettling: what if we take seriously the fact that Taipei sits on a floodplain, shaped by the Tamsui River system and monsoon rains.

Through river walks, public talks, and temporary interventions, participants observed flood marks on retaining walls, studied maps of projected inundation zones under climate change scenarios, and listened to local stories about past typhoons. They were invited to read the city not primarily as a network of roads and property, but as a landscape defined by water and its movements.

The phrase Taipei tomorrow as a lake again plays on a recurring fear: the image of the entire city underwater after the next big storm. Wu’s projects do not resolve that anxiety. Instead, they use it as an opening to talk about who lives in low-lying areas, whose homes are labeled as unsafe, who profits from riverfront development, and how decisions about flood defenses get made.

If Plum Tree Creek turns a neglected tributary into a public classroom, these river projects make the city itself a pedagogy site. They show that climate risk is not abstract. It is mapped onto very specific neighborhoods, very specific bodies.

Now let us travel south.

If the creek and river projects are about water and metropolitan transformation in northern Taiwan, Cijin is about food, migration, and maritime change in the south.

Cijin is a narrow island that forms part of Kaohsiung’s harbor. Historically a fishing community, it has been reshaped by militarization, port expansion, container shipping, and now tourism. Long-term residents live alongside migrant workers and new arrivals from across the Taiwan Strait and Southeast Asia, plus waves of tourists who come for seafood.

Around 2014, Wu began working in Cijin through an initiative often called Cijin Kitchen, based in the kitchen of a former naval dormitory complex that National Sun Yat-sen University had turned into a cultural base. Again, the site choice carries meaning: a space once dedicated to military logistics becomes a space for community cooking and research.

Imagine arriving on the island by the short ferry ride from downtown Kaohsiung. You step off into a grid of small streets with temples, seafood stalls, scooter repair shops, and guesthouses. The former dormitory sits slightly away from the main tourist strip. Its kitchen is compact and functional: metal counters, tiled walls, windows that open toward the harbor.

Here, Wu and her graduate students from National Kaohsiung Normal University set up what she later called Cijin’s tongue, a kind of multicultural social lab that uses food to understand the island’s changing social ecology. 

The method is straightforward in outline.

Students visited residents to talk about everyday meals. They asked not only for recipes, but for stories around them: where the fish is bought, which spices come from which hometown, how ingredients have changed with rising prices or overfishing, who cooks and who eats together. In many cases, these conversations opened onto wider histories of migration, marriage, labor at sea, and political change.

The team then mapped what they found. One set of maps traced ingredients: which ones came from the harbor, which from industrial aquaculture, which from faraway seas. Another set traced people: the home regions and countries of Cijin’s residents.

Out of this research, they organized cooking events and small performances in the kitchen. Graduate students would re-enact a resident’s cooking process, narrating the story they had heard. Sometimes the residents would sit at the table and watch; sometimes they would jump in, correct the method, or add missing details. Everyone ate together at the end.

From a sound perspective, this is a rich scene: knives on cutting boards, the sizzle of stir-fries, bowls clinking, voices overlapping, with the rumble of harbor traffic in the background. For listeners to this podcast, you can probably imagine how vivid that would be in audio form.

From the outside, it could be misread as a nice community cuisine project. From up close, it becomes clear that the kitchen is a listening device. It picks up and amplifies stories of precarious work, disappearing fish species, changing tides, rising seas, and the slow violence of port development.

As Taiwan scholar Wei-Hsiu Tung has argued, Cijin Kitchen functions as a form of environmental aesthetic awakening and civic engagement. By treating food, recipes, and kitchen talk as artistic material, the project surfaces environmental and political issues that normally remain hidden in the background of daily life. 

Once again, domestic labor is central. There is no project without the traditionally feminized work of cooking, washing, and hosting. But here, that labor becomes a lens on the ocean and on the global circulations of goods, people, and risk.

In this sense, Cijin’s tongue is both literal and metaphorical. It is the literal tongue that tastes and speaks, and it is also the island’s way of speaking back to the systems that have reshaped it.

Before we close, I want to bring in one more project that shifts the focus from water and kitchens to soil.

In a work often translated as To Reconstruct 1 cubic centimeter of Land, It Requires a Centennial, Wu asks us to zoom in on the smallest unit of land and to think about time. 

One cubic centimeter of fertile soil is tiny. You could balance it on a fingernail. But to form that much healthy soil, nature may require decades or even centuries of weathering, decomposition, and the quiet labor of microorganisms, worms, and plant roots.

In installations and workshops connected to this project, participants handle soil samples, seeds, and small cultivated plots. They are invited to imagine how much time, how many cycles of life and death, are compacted into a pinch of earth. And then to consider how quickly that accumulated time can be erased by bulldozers, speculative building, or industrial farming.

Where Plum Tree Creek talks about mending broken land with water, and Cijin Kitchen reads coastal change through food, this cubic centimeter of land insists that regeneration is slow by definition. You cannot rush the formation of soil. You can only protect it and care for it.

At the same time, the project is not only about loss. It emphasizes micro acts of cultivation that ordinary people can undertake: tending a community garden, protecting a roadside tree, restoring a small patch of ground in front of an apartment building. The cubic centimeter becomes a unit of attention as well as a unit of earth. 

Wu’s focus on land time reminds us that regenerative artivism is not just about memorable events or beautiful documentation. It is also about patient, often invisible work that aligns human time with ecological time. 

If we step back from these four clusters – the creek, the rivers, the kitchen, and the cubic centimeter of soil – what can we learn about regenerative artivism more broadly.

Let me draw out four points.

First, regeneration needs infrastructure. Plum Tree Creek depended on Bamboo Curtain Studio as a long-term, trusted presence, with space, networks, and institutional memory. The river projects drew on alliances among artists, scientists, and planners. Cijin Kitchen relied on a public university willing to support an experimental kitchen project in a former naval dormitory, plus a network of students and island residents. The land project requires access to sites, classrooms, and communities willing to think with soil.

We often celebrate the visible moments – the festival, the award, the photogenic event – but those moments sit on top of years of unglamorous infrastructure-building.

Second, regeneration works through everyday practices. Breakfast at Plum Tree Creek looks like people having breakfast. The river walks look like people strolling along levees, talking. Cijin Kitchen looks like people cooking and eating in a small kitchen. The soil project looks like people bending down to examine dirt.

Yet these are exactly the practices where perception changes. Eating beside a polluted creek makes the state of the water impossible to ignore. Mapping flood lines on familiar walls makes climate projections immediate. Cooking someone else’s recipe makes their migration story tangible. Holding a pinch of soil and thinking about how long it took to form changes how you see a construction site.

Regenerative artivism, in this sense, is less about adding an artistic layer on top of life and more about rearranging daily routines so that ecological and social relations come into view.

Third, regeneration is entangled with governance. Plum Tree Creek’s activities fed into local environmental policy and investments in sewage infrastructure. The river projects intersected with public debates about zoning and flood control. Cijin Kitchen offered grounded knowledge about coastal livelihoods that could be, and sometimes was, translated into discussions with municipal authorities. The soil project implicitly questions land valuation models that reward rapid extraction over long-term care.

This entanglement is messy. There are compromises, half-measures, and risks of co-optation. But Wu’s work suggests that if you want structural change, you cannot avoid institutions altogether. The question becomes how to engage them tactically without losing your ability to critique and imagine otherwise. 

Fourth, regeneration in her practice is ecofeminist in spirit, whether or not it uses that label. Care work, teaching, cooking, cleaning, and patient listening sit at the center of environmental practice, not at the edge. Women’s labor, often unpaid and taken for granted, becomes highly visible in these projects – and at the same time, the projects expose how heavy that burden can be.

Ecofeminist theory reminds us that care must be recognized and redistributed, not simply romanticized. Wu’s work aligns with that insight. It honors domestic and pedagogical labor as a source of political intelligence, while also pointing toward the need to share it more fairly. 

If you are listening from far away, what might all this mean for you.

You may not have a Bamboo Curtain Studio in your neighborhood. You may not be able to turn a naval kitchen into a social lab. But you probably have a nearby waterway, however small, some kind of shared food space – a school cafeteria, a church kitchen, a street corner food stall – and a patch of ground that you pass often.

What would it mean to treat those places as potential sites of regenerative artivism.

Could breakfast by a canal in your city become a recurring gathering that brings neighbors, scientists, and officials into conversation. Could a school kitchen become a place where students trace where their ingredients come from and who grows them. Could a neglected strip of soil beside a sidewalk become a shared experiment in cultivation and observation.

None of these actions will solve the climate crisis. They will not, on their own, stop a dam, clean an entire river, or reverse sea-level rise. But they might change who talks to whom, what kind of knowledge is considered legitimate, and how decisions get made over time.

As you think about this, it is worth resisting two temptations.

The first is the obsession with scale: the idea that only big projects with big budgets and big audiences count. Wu’s projects show that small-scale, repeated actions can accumulate significant impact over years.

The second is the desire for purity: the fantasy that real change can only come from work that refuses any engagement with compromised institutions. In practice, regenerative artivism often involves navigating uncomfortable alliances and partial victories. That friction is not a sign of failure. It is part of the work.

To close, I invite you into a brief reflection.

Think of a waterway near you. It may be a river, a creek, a canal, a drainage ditch that runs only when it rains, or an invisible pipe system that you rarely see.

How do you encounter this water. Do you see it, hear it, smell it. Or is it hidden.

Who lives closest to it. Who depends on it most directly. Who has the power to make decisions about it.

Are there already groups that care for this water – cleaning it, monitoring it, organizing around it. If so, what kinds of cultural practices do they use: songs, banners, shared meals, scientific data, rituals.

If there is no such group, what might a first small gesture look like. Not a masterpiece, not a fully designed project. Simply a first step.

Now, think of a kitchen or food space you know well, and a patch of ground you encounter often. What stories, labors, and histories are present there, even if they are not yet spoken. Who might you need to listen to in order to understand those places better.

Plum Tree Creek did not become a watershed commons in a single year. Cijin Kitchen did not suddenly make maritime labor visible with one event. The soil project does not change land politics overnight. These practices gain their strength from patience and repetition.

Regeneration is slow. But it is one of the few plausible ways to respond to ecological and social crisis without collapsing into despair or denial.

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures.

If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app.

Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.