Hsiao Li-Hung: From Chicken Farm to Creative Ecology on the Tamsui River

Hsiao Li-Hung (蕭麗虹), also known as Margaret Hsiao, built one of Taiwan’s most influential platforms for socially engaged and ecological art by starting with what was available: a repurposed chicken coop on the river’s edge in Zhuwei, near the Tamsui River system. This episode traces how Bamboo Curtain Studio (竹圍工作室) grew from a making-centered ceramics site into a porous cultural commons—one that treats residency, reuse, and neighborhood exchange as core artistic media rather than supporting logistics.

From that riverbank base, we follow the long-running cultural action Art as Environment at Plum Tree Creek (樹梅坑溪環境藝術行動), developed with artist and curator Wu Mali. The project refuses the idea that public art is simply an object placed outdoors. Instead, it rebuilds public life around a neglected waterway through school programs, community planning experiments, and monthly breakfast gatherings that use seasonal food as a way to convene, listen, and stay. Along the way, the episode reflects on ecofeminist care, the cultural texture of everyday ritual, and why institutions matter not only for what they present, but for what they can hold over time.

Keywords
Hsiao Li-Hung 蕭麗虹, Margaret Hsiao, Bamboo Curtain Studio竹圍工作室, Zhuwei 竹圍, Tamsui River 淡水河, Plum Tree Creek 樹梅坑溪, Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek樹梅坑溪環境藝術行動, Wu Mali 吳瑪悧, artist residency, alternative space, cultural action, commons, new genre public art, environmental pedagogy, breakfast gatherings, repair and reuse, ecofeminism, civic infrastructure, archiving

Key references 

Bamboo Curtain Studio (竹圍工作室). “About Founder | The Bamboo Curtain Studio.” https://bambooculture.com/en/project/4152.html.

Bamboo Curtain Studio (竹圍工作室). “Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek.” https://bambooculture.com/en/project/2004.html.

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 

Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (文化部). “Culture Minister Offers Condolences on Bamboo Curtain Studio Founder Margaret Shiu’s Passing.” August 30, 2021. https://www.moc.gov.tw/en/News_Content2.aspx?n=467&s=16056.

New Taipei City Art Museum (新北市美術館). “Archive Content Construction for Art as Environment—A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek.” https://ntcart.museum/EN/collections_research_subject.aspx.

Purtill, Corinne. “Artist Gives New Life to a Polluted Taiwan Stream.” Dialogue Earth, April 29, 2013 (updated May 14, 2020). https://dialogue.earth/en/pollution/5832-artist-gives-new-life-to-a-polluted-taiwan-stream/.

Taipei Fine Arts Museum (臺北市立美術館). Small Is Bountiful: Margaret Shiu’s Contemporary Art Collection. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum. 2022.

Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture (台新銀行文化藝術基金會). “Art as Environment—A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek.” Taishin Arts Award. https://www.taishinart.org.tw/en/art-award-year-detail/2012/463.

Tung, Wei Hsiu (董維琇). “Art and Aesthetic Environmental Awakening at Plum Tree Creek.” The Newsletter 76 (Spring 2017), International Institute for Asian Studies. 

My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang

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, I want to take you to a river edge in northern Taiwan, where city life and wetland life press right up against each other. In this transitional landscape, an artist and cultural worker built something that looks modest at first glance, but has quietly shaped the ecology of socially engaged and environmental art in Taiwan for decades.

Her name is Hsiao Li-Hung (蕭麗虹), also known as Margaret Hsiao.

Picture a riverbank in suburban Zhuwei, just north of Taipei, close to the Tamsui River system. You are a ten-minute walk from a metro station, and yet the air feels different. There is a wetland nearby, dense with mangroves. The ground has that slightly soft, river-edge feel. You can hear bikes passing on a riverside path. And you can also sense the city’s pressure, because it is right there: high-rise living, fast transport, constant development.

Now, just off that path, you step into an arts space that did not arrive as a polished monument. It arrived as a repurposed site: a former chicken coop, a courtyard, a few buildings arranged around daily work. It is a place that never fully seals itself off from humidity, weather, and the smell of water.

This is Bamboo Curtain Studio, often shortened to BCS.

BCS began in 1995, when Hsiao leased an unused chicken coop from her husband’s family and, together with artist collaborators, started transforming it into a shared ceramic studio and alternative exhibition space. A large gas kiln was central from the beginning, which tells you something: this was a place built for making, for labor, for material intensity, not just for display.

I want to linger on that origin story because it contains an entire philosophy of practice.

Hsiao did not start with a museum building and then ask what to put inside. She started with a rough, reused site and asked what kinds of relationships could grow there: between artists and neighbors, between visiting practitioners and local ecologies, between cultural work and the politics of land and water.

And she did this with a biography that is quietly instructive.

Hsiao was born in Hong Kong in 1946. She went to the United States to study economics at UC Berkeley, and she worked as an economist before moving to Taiwan in 1976 and shifting her career path into art and cultural work.

This matters because it means she understood development from the inside. She understood the language of progress: the plans, the metrics, the arguments that say a river is a corridor and a wetland is a leftover. And then she chose to build a cultural institution that refused that reduction.

Let me be precise about what I mean by institution, because the word can sound heavy.

BCS is not only a venue. It has long described itself as serving creative talents and building a creative environment: offering time, space, facilities, and services for artists-in-residence and for experimentation. Over time, it also framed its work around reuse of spaces and action research in the city, becoming, in its own words, a kind of unofficial micro cultural think tank.

That is a revealing phrase: micro think tank.

It suggests that thinking is not only for universities or government offices. Thinking can be practiced in a courtyard on a riverbank, through hosting, through workshops, through meals, through projects that fold research into everyday life.

And the riverbank matters.

BCS sits in an interface landscape where wetland, metro line, and river engineering projects all coexist. Wetlands are often treated as either scenic backdrops or obstacles to development. But they are also living infrastructures: mangroves that stabilize shorelines, habitats that hold biodiversity, and buffers that absorb flood energy. When you place an art space next to a wetland, you are placing culture next to a system that is already doing environmental work.

That proximity can produce two very different outcomes. It can become a form of green aesthetic branding, the kind of cultural softening that makes development feel benign. Or it can become a reminder that cultural life depends on ecological life, and that art spaces have responsibilities to the environments that host them.

Hsiao’s long-term programming suggests she leaned toward the second. BCS repeatedly framed itself not only as an alternative exhibition space but as a platform for creative city action research. In other words, it treated the neighborhood and the watershed as sites where knowledge is produced through doing, with residents, rather than only represented from a distance.

So here is the theme I want you to listen for. Hsiao’s most consequential art may be the conditions she built for other people to work, learn, and connect.

Now let us pause on a familiar contemporary-art format: the artist residency.

Residencies are everywhere today. They have become standard cultural infrastructure. Artists travel. They spend a few weeks or months in a new place. They make something. The host organization posts photos. Everyone moves on.

That model can do good. It can also reproduce extractive patterns: the artist arrives, takes inspiration and material, and leaves, while the host community becomes a backdrop.

BCS pushed against that early, and it did so through the unglamorous work of exchange: hosting, translation, introducing visiting artists to local residents, and building routines that encourage site responsibility rather than cultural tourism.

Over the years, BCS hosted hundreds of artists and cultural workers, and it also functioned as a bridge into regional networks. It helped make Taiwan legible as a site of practice for international visitors, while also helping local artists connect outward.

So, what does it mean to build a residency as an ecological and social institution, not as a temporary cultural stopover.

To answer, we need to follow a creek.

Plum Tree Creek runs through the Zhuwei area near Bamboo Curtain Studio. It is approximately 13 kilometers long, with sources in the Datun Mountain (大屯山) area. Multiple tributaries converge as it flows through the urban district before meeting the Tamsui River.

If you have lived in a city, you probably already know the story pattern: a creek that once carried daily life becomes a drainage channel; water becomes an engineering problem; pollution becomes normal; and eventually people stop seeing the creek at all.

Beginning in 2009, and developed through later phases, Hsiao and collaborators, including the artist and curator Wu Mali and the team at Bamboo Curtain Studio, initiated Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek. The project’s early focus was to raise awareness of pollution and changing water flow, and it later received major recognition through the Taishin Arts Award, the leading contemporary arts award in Taiwan.

The award description notes that the cultural action began by working to restore the environment of Plum Tree Creek to fit its name, and by depicting a vision for what the creek could be.

I want to pause on that phrase, to fit its name, because it is both poetic and political.

A name is a form of memory. It carries a history of what a place once was, or what people once hoped it could be. When a creek becomes so polluted or engineered that its name feels like a joke, something larger is happening: not only ecological degradation, but the loss of shared imagination.

So part of the project’s work was to rebuild imagination as a civic capacity. Not imagination as fantasy, but imagination as a practical tool for planning: the ability to say, together, this creek can be different, and here is what that difference would require.

To be clear: Art as Environment is not a single artwork. It is not even a single exhibition. It is a bundled ecology of programs, built over time, designed to turn a neglected creek into a commons—a shared site of collective attention and action.

One subtitle captures its ethic: Mending the Broken Land with Water.

Mending is the right word. It implies partial repair, ongoing attention, and the humility to work inside constraints. It also points to a core idea in regenerative artivism: the work is less about representing ecological crisis and more about reorganizing everyday relations to land and water.

So what did that reorganization look like.

Let us start with education, because in this project, education is not an add-on. It is a primary medium.

In one program, BCS invited visual and performing artists to school campuses to work with teachers and sixth-grade students. Students learned about the creek and created artworks using Plum Tree Creek as their theme. The stated method emphasized learning through the five senses, so that environmental knowledge begins with embodied attention rather than distant abstraction.

If you have ever taught, you know what is difficult here. It is easy to tell students that nature is precious. It is harder to teach them that the creek behind their neighborhood is part of nature too, even when it smells, even when it is ugly, even when it has been treated as disposable.

This kind of pedagogy is not sentimental. It is politically significant. It gives students permission to care about an ordinary place, and it frames that care as something they can practice with others. A child who learns the creek’s bends and smells and plant life is less likely to accept its disappearance as normal. That is how environmental politics begins, long before anyone calls it activism.

Now let us move from the classroom to the street.

Another strand of Art as Environment treated planning and communal space as public questions. Rather than keeping urban design inside government offices, collaborators used public-facing activities and temporary structures to invite residents to imagine what kinds of shared spaces and services could strengthen neighborhood life, including practices of repair and reuse.

One element that often appears in descriptions is the handcraft market. I bring it up because it can be misunderstood. Craft can sound like nostalgia. But in an ecological context, repair skills are not nostalgia. They are resilience.

When a community has spaces where people exchange repair knowledge, they reduce dependence on constant consumption. They strengthen social ties. They create slower rhythms that make it easier to notice what is happening to water, soil, and food.

That is an infrastructural insight. Regeneration is not only about planting trees or cleaning a creek. It is also about rebuilding social capacities that industrial modernity has eroded.

And that brings us to the strand that, to me, is one of the most quietly radical: breakfast.

Art as Environment included local harvest and breakfast meetings, where residents shared food and talked about water, land use, flooding, and neighborhood futures.

Breakfast meetings were held on the last weekend of each month, in different locations along Plum Tree Creek. Locally grown seasonal fruits and vegetables were chosen each month in accordance with the solar term. Specialists from different fields were invited, but the point was not a lecture. The point was a platform for informal conversation, bringing together residents who lived along different sections of the creek, from upper to middle to lower stream.

So what did people actually eat.

They followed a rotating calendar of seasonal ingredients. One month, the featured ingredient was mugwort, a plant used across East Asia in seasonal foods, often associated with springtime harvesting. Another month, tied to the summer solstice, featured green bamboo shoots, a prized seasonal food in Taiwan that signals summer’s arrival as much as it signals taste. Sometimes the foods were described not only as ingredients but as shared dishes.

I’m emphasizing these specifics because they change how we understand the politics of a breakfast meeting.

This is not symbolic food. This is not food used as a cute metaphor for community. It is food as an infrastructure of staying.

A monthly rhythm creates return. A shared ingredient creates a simple reason for people to show up even if they disagree about other things. A solar-term calendar ties ecological awareness to everyday time, not abstract environmental time. And cooking together makes the creek legible again, because it reconnects water to cultivation, cultivation to diet, and diet to the small decisions that accumulate into collective life.

A meal is also a method of making people stay in the conversation. It lowers the temperature of debate, not by avoiding conflict, but by making conversation possible in a shared space. It brings water politics into the body. You taste the watershed as you talk about it.

Now, some listeners might be wondering: where is the activism here. Where is the confrontation.

It is there, but it does not always look like a protest.

Art as Environment directly addressed pollution, water flow, and the consequences of neglect. It also framed these issues as inseparable from urban development and boundless expansion. Water was presented not only as a natural element but as a connector that gathers people concerned about land, development, and community life.

This is activism through assembling a public. Not a public formed by outrage alone, but a public sustained by repeated gatherings, learning, and the shared work of noticing.

And this is where ecofeminism matters.

Ecofeminism is a big word, and it can mean many things. But one of its most durable insights is that environmental crises and social crises are intertwined, and that care work is not secondary to politics. Care is politics.

In the Plum Tree Creek project, care is not a metaphor. Care is a method: working with students, cooking and eating together, returning again and again to the creek, and building relationships that can hold disagreement without collapsing.

There is also a cultural and spiritual texture here that environmental narratives sometimes flatten.

The Zhuwei area, like many places in Taiwan, is dense with temples, shrines, incense, and everyday ritual. Project accounts describe prayer for self, others, and the environment, and they situate ecological care inside lived cultural practice rather than treating it as purely technical management.

I want to be careful. Spirituality does not automatically produce ecological politics. But it shapes how people understand what they owe to places, and how they make meaning in the face of loss. If we want to understand regenerative practice in East Asia, we cannot treat that cultural texture as optional. It is part of the social ecology of repair.

So where does Hsiao Li-Hung sit inside this complex ecology.

She is often remembered as founder, host, and connector. That is accurate. But I think the more precise point is this: she treated the platform as part of the artwork.

In a field that often rewards what is portable and attributable, she invested in the slow work of enabling other people’s work: maintaining a site, sustaining partnerships, staying in conversation with policy and education, and making room for experiments that could not survive inside market logics.

Even BCS’s public self-descriptions emphasize this long-term approach, sorting its work into categories such as alternative space, art intervention, and artist residency, and describing its role as offering space and services for creative minds while connecting them with Taiwan.

This has aesthetic stakes.

The choice to reuse a chicken farm rather than build a new facility is an aesthetic choice. The choice to hold a discussion over breakfast rather than on a conference stage is an aesthetic choice. The choice to treat a polluted creek as a curriculum is an aesthetic choice. The choice to build a residency that asks visitors to learn from a place, rather than consume it, is an aesthetic choice.

In other words, infrastructure is not outside art. Infrastructure can be art.

Here is another way to put it.

Many ecological art projects are imagined as interventions. They arrive, they mark a problem, they propose a vision, and they end. That model can be powerful, especially in moments of crisis.

Hsiao’s work makes visible a different model: ecological institution-building. Instead of asking only, what artwork can respond to this creek, she also asked, what kinds of ongoing structures could keep people returning to the creek after the artwork is gone.

This is not glamorous work. It includes leases, budgets, staff schedules, cleaning, liability, and the constant negotiation of how open a space can be while still surviving. But it is precisely in those mundane details that regenerative work either becomes possible or collapses.

When Art as Environment received major recognition, it was not only for its environmental message, but for how it turned social and ecological questions into shared practice, with deep community participation. That is what makes it a new type of public art.

It suggests that public art is not only monuments or beautification. Public art can be the slow building of an environmental public: a public that can talk about water flow, pollution, planning, and daily life in the same breath.

Now we have to face the hard part of any infrastructure story: institutions are fragile.

Hsiao passed away in 2021, and many cultural institutions publicly marked her contributions and their loss.

If you have ever been part of a community arts organization, you know this tension. Some projects end. Some spaces close. Funding cycles run out. Key people leave. It is not a moral failure. It is the reality of cultural labor inside uneven economies.

So what remains.

One answer is that BCS helped build a field. It helped normalize the idea that alternative spaces can be central to cultural life in Taiwan. It linked local environmental struggles to wider regional conversations. It helped demonstrate that ecological art can be built through long-term community work, not only through spectacle.

You can see that field-building in multiple directions.

One direction is institutional sustainability. For example, BCS facilitated Arts of Coming Down to Earth in 2020, a program aimed at raising sustainability commitments among visual arts organizations across Taiwan, including concrete steps like evaluating carbon footprints and transforming institutional practices. What matters here is not only the program itself, but the shift in assumption: that the arts are not exempt from ecological accountability, and that institutions can change their habits rather than simply producing more ecological content.

Another direction is network building. BCS partnered with projects like Creative Responses to Sustainability, which gathered interviews and recommendations on how cultural initiatives engaging sustainability could be better supported.

Another direction is care for art histories themselves. Hsiao was also known as a collector and advocate who supported Taiwanese artists over decades. A major museum exhibition later centered a large group of works she collected over nearly forty years and donated in 2021. That act complicates what we mean by regeneration.

Regeneration is not only ecological. It is also cultural memory and cultural continuity. It is the question of what kinds of work a society chooses to carry forward, and who does the carrying.

And there is one more kind of durability that often gets ignored: archiving.

In 2024, a museum initiative in New Taipei City described a project to categorize and build archival content for Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek, using materials provided by Bamboo Curtain Studio.

That may sound bureaucratic, but it matters. If socially engaged and ecological projects are not archived well, they become easy to dismiss as temporary events. Archives are part of infrastructure. They allow future researchers, educators, and organizers to learn from what worked, what failed, and what the work actually looked like in practice.

There is one more moment, from later in Hsiao’s life, that helps clarify her orientation.

In April 2020, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hsiao published a short reflection through BCS. She described the shock of realizing that what felt probable had become real, and she asked how people could carry on and share creative ways of reaching others through isolation. It also shows something steady in her practice: crisis was not an excuse to pause cultural work, but a reason to rethink how cultural work connects people. Connectivity itself became part of the medium.

And this is a useful place to begin closing.

I want to offer three lenses to carry with you, not as a summary, but as a way of sharpening what you have just heard.

First, material durability. Where does the work happen, and who holds the land, the rent, the maintenance? BCS began with a leased chicken coop. That detail is a lesson in pragmatics, not romance. It reminds us that regeneration often begins with a site that is imperfect and already marked by labor.

Second, social durability. What routines keep people showing up: school programs, repeated meetings, shared meals. The breakfast gatherings at Plum Tree Creek are a clear example of how ordinary hospitality can become environmental politics. The point is not that food solves conflict. The point is that food creates the conditions for conflict to be held, revisited, and worked through without the conversation evaporating.

Third, epistemic durability. How does knowledge stay in circulation: through archives, publications, and networks that keep local methods from dissolving into past events. This is where BCS’s role in sustainability research and regional exchange becomes part of the story, not an afterthought.

Let me return to the riverbank one last time.

A former chicken farm. A gas kiln. A courtyard that refuses to seal itself off from humidity, weather, and the smell of water. A creek that refuses to disappear even when planners treat it as a drain. A community learning, slowly, to see water as memory, and care as politics.

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.