2019 Treasure Hill Light Festival: A Fantastical Display of Sound, Light, and Visuals with Endless Outdoor Photo Opportunities

By MOOK Scenic Spots Family / Compiled and Reported
 
Located by the riverside near Gongguan, “Treasure Hill Artist Village” has hosted the Treasure Hill Light Festival since 2012, with each year exploring a different social theme through its curation. Last year’s theme, “Here and There,” opened up visitors’ imagination of “light” in new ways. This year’s 2019 Treasure Hill Light Festival, themed “Wildscape,” presents a contradictory vision of modern civilization and the wild through the creative language of artists, the connection of art and cultural events, participant interaction, and collaboration between local residents and students.

From the moment you step into the village, the art collective Yan i uses the work “Looking for Him Among a Thousand Others” to take people on a stroll through the alleys of the settlement, counting the street lamps and scenery underfoot. Their care for the natural environment is also reflected in the works of Human and Olga Diego, who created a fake mountain landscape with a glowing waterfall made from recycled waste and plastic, as well as an inflatable electronic installation forming a shiny plastic wonderland of humanity.

Deep within Treasure Hill stands Xu Tangwei’s “Rainbow Light Tree: Planet of Fruits.” These two planets resemble wild, primal spaces full of vitality, gazing toward the giant transparent tent built at the settlement’s entrance by Isozaki Michiya. Zhuang Zhiheng’s “Sundial Trace” leaves streaks of light on the walls of village houses, recreating traces of life within the settlement.

In the Semi-Floor Plaza stands Li Chengliang’s stage broadcasting system “Eternal Station,” transformed from a spherical water tower, where people can climb up like boarding a rooftop space station to sing and dream wild dreams. Next to it, the projection on the corrugated iron roof, “Signal Lost – Night” by Guo Yichen, responds to the alienated relationships among people in his work, reflecting Li Chengliang’s imagined scene of “Eternal Station” born from modern-day alienation. The machine gun bunker behind also transforms into a wormhole leading to a secret cosmic base.

The development of artificial intelligence blurs genuine emotions, and Chen Yunru and Ryutaro Takahashi interpret today’s societal encounter with technological enslavement through facial tracking and online games.