WORM 25- Queering farming: Walking Grass Agriculture

This queer wedding picture below was made by Hsing-You Liu, one half of the Taiwanese artist duo Walking Grass Agriculture (走路草農/藝團).

It shows his parents, farmers in the rural south of Taiwan, as a bridal couple in drag: His mother as the groom, wearing a suit and a safety helmet; his father as the bride, in a bridal gown and veil.

The picture is also a piece of cross-dressing on a technical level: it’s a cross-processed photograph, a developing lab technique in which negative film is processed with the chemicals for positive film. The result is “false” – or rather, in this case, queer – colours.

Hsing-You Liu (劉星佑) and Han-Sheng Chen (陳漢聲), the two halves of Walking Grass Agriculture, are also a married couple in real life, in the only Asian country that has legalized gay marriage. The photo is a document of Hsing-You’s parents’ trust in their son, and their love and pride in who he is and what he does, despite the differences from their own lifestyle.

Queering Taiwan’s rural farming culture is one of Walking Grass Agriculture’s major projects. As screenprinters, they are inspired by the homemade colourful fruit logos that Taiwanese farmers print on the boxes of fruit they sell at markets. In their piece, “Journey of Fruits and Vegetables”, Walking Grass Agriculture brought these boxes to contemporary art museums and galleries and taught children how to make their own fruit prints.

They also transformed fruit prints into a “Homesick box travel-TN360,” a contraption of printed folding screens on a Honda mini-truck. This vehicle is popular with Taiwanese farmers for transporting fruit to markets. But it is also used for advertising campaigns, both commercial and political, as the trucks roam the streets of Taiwanese cities and broadcast their messages through their sound systems, often with campaign speakers standing on the truck’s bed. Walking Grass Agriculture turned it into a playful device designed to cure rural people of their homesickness in Taiwan’s hypermodern cities.

At the same time, Walking Grass Agriculture’s fruit printmaking explores the country’s complex history, as Taiwan’s agriculture and cultivated plants have been successively shaped by the Dutch colonial trade of the 17th century, the Japanese colonization of the island in the 19th century, the military dictatorship of exiled Chinese nationalists after World War II, and the coexistence of ethnic Chinese and indigenous Taiwanese people in present-day democratic Taiwan.

At WORM’s Slash Gallery, (September 25th onwards with two, prior,  Queer Kitchen nights on the 13th and 14th), their work will focus on plants that were brought to the island by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and that they are now bringing back to the Netherlands. Walking Grass Agriculture will collaborate with local Rotterdam artists Benjamin Li and Pascalle de Jager, who will reflect on the East Asian cultural heritage in the Netherlands.

Unlike Taiwan’s more mainstream, highbrow, white cube artists, Walking Grass Agriculture’s projects are always humorous, playful, pop-cultural, inviting to all, and conducted as real-life experiments rather than conventional exhibitions. They are well known in Taiwan’s contemporary art world, but also seen as misfits because of the humour in their work.

All the more reason for WORM to welcome Hsing-You and Han-Sheng to its playground in Rotterdam and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of WORM with them!

Text and photos: Florian Cramer.

 

WALKING GRASS AGRICULTURE calendar:
14th September – Open Studio (13:00 – 18:00) – Art Centraal XL
15th September – Open Studio (13:00 – 18:00) – Art Centraal XL
25th September – Queer Kitchen Exhibition Opening (15:00 – 20:00)
Exhibition dates – 26th -29th September (14:00 – 19:00)