When Social Practice Art Overcomes Globalisation: Attending to Environment and Locality in Taiwan

Abstract

This essay discusses how artists, architects, and local community people have collaborated together to regenerate an everyday life aesthetics that embodies and reflects the environmental specificity of local culture, history, and geography in the context of Taiwan, where systematic urbanisation has had a very negative impact in many different areas since the early 2000s. The essay explores the possibility of local aesthetics retrieving the feelings of the Taiwanese “vernacular worlds” against the effects of globalisation, urbanisation and rapid socio-political changes. Two social practice art projects are considered accordingly: Plum Tree Creek and Togo Village.