Formosa North Coast Arts Festival 2024

With “Coastal Line Mapping” as the curatorial theme, the 2024 Formosa North Coast Arts Festival began from the understanding that the boundary between land and sea is never fixed. Tides advance and retreat, winds and waves continually redraw the coastline, and the dividing line between land and ocean remains in constant motion.
Taking “mapping” as a curatorial method rather than a representational outcome, the curatorial team invited 23 contemporary artists to co-create works through field research, interviews with local residents, site-specific creation, community-based design, and the connection of local art clusters. In this process, artworks responded directly to the coastal landscape and everyday life of the North Coast, allowing art not only to be viewed, but also to be calibrated through local participation and daily engagement.
As the boundary between beaches and coastlines shifts over time, the defining highlight of this edition lies in positioning “movement” as the core viewing experience. Artworks were distributed across multiple route nodes in Jinshan, Wanli, Shimen, and Sanzhi—from bus stops along Provincial Highway No. 2, to beaches, cafés, and community hot spring facilities. Audiences completed the viewing experience while moving, with each visitor tracing a different path, collectively mapping a unique and ever-changing “coastal line” of the festival.
One example is the transformation of 12 bus stops, where marine debris was repurposed into artworks, allowing travelers and local residents to encounter art during everyday moments of waiting. Community-focused workshops, such as cyanotype printing using coastal plants and wave-inspired weaving, translated the colors and textures of the shoreline into tangible memories that participants could take with them.
Large-scale installations and environmental education works intervened in the landscape through land art approaches, deliberately exposing artworks to typhoons and seasonal changes. By returning the works to the inherently unstable conditions of the North Coast, “dissolution” itself became part of the festival’s narrative, acknowledging impermanence as an authentic coastal reality.