Over The Ridgelines 越過山稜線

This exhibition takes the mountains surrounding Taoyuan as its theme. I was fortunate to include two works, *Hutoushan* and *Fuxing Basin*, by local Taoyuan painter SHEN Hsiu-Cheng, who taught at Wuling Senior High School for more than thirty years. He once mentioned that he often took his students to Hutoushan for outings and landscape sketching—an experience very close to my own memories of growing up in Taoyuan. Hutoushan is indeed a familiar neighbour to the people of Taoyuan.

LIANG Ting-Yu’s *The Beheaded Stream* explores the history of conflicts between Indigenous peoples and Han settlers in the border region between Taoyuan and Hsinchu. Rather than relying solely on written historical records, Liang pieces together traces of these events through methods such as asking local Earth Gods questions by casting divination blocks and communicating with headless ghosts through spirit mediums.

LIN Yi-Chun’s new work takes inspiration from the *naoliao*, camphor-processing huts established near camphor forests in mountainous areas beginning in the Qing dynasty. The work connects the sensory experience of “smell” produced through camphor extraction—whether the smell of camphor itself or the smell associated with labour—with collective history and memory.