| I have always loved trees. I make donations to the San Francisco Friends of Urban Forest as wedding presents and in celebrations of births. I also donate trees in loving memory of friends who have died. Often I ask myself, “What will the world be like for generations to come?” If we can plant a tree for those who have passed and those who are newly born, we might be able to maintain a green globe for younger generations. As an installation artist, I have worked with thousands of sewing needles and literally miles of red thread to create wall and ground installations as well as sculptures. A few years ago I saw a tree trunk lying at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota while I was on a residency there. As I stared at the dead tree, I envisioned Trees with Arteries. It seemed that the tree trunk was asking me to speak for the trees. |  |
Hung Su-Chen
I have always loved trees. I make donations to the San Francisco Friends of Urban Forest as wedding presents and in celebrations of births. I also donate trees in loving memory of friends who have died. Often I ask myself, “What will the world be like for generations to come?” If we can plant a tree for those who have passed and those who are newly born, we might be able to maintain a green globe for younger generations.
As an installation artist, I have worked with thousands of sewing needles and literally miles of red thread to create wall and ground installations as well as sculptures. A few years ago I saw a tree trunk lying at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota while I was on a residency there. As I stared at the dead tree, I envisioned Trees with Arteries. It seemed that the tree trunk was asking me to speak for the trees. Trees have arteries; they can feel pain when human beings are killing them.
Trees with Arteries is my second installation where I’ve spoken up for trees. In 1992, I did another piece using a redwood tree that was hung from the ceiling above a petri dish on the floor that contained a seedling. This piece was a prototype for a larger installation consisting of a group of logs suspended above a similar number of petri dishes. Visitors would move through a dead, silent forest hanging inches above a struggling forest of tomorrow.
For this exhibition, Trees with Arteries, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, I used a five-meter-long Taiwanese longan tree that had died. We removed it and sliced it into three-centimeter-thick pieces, drilling nine holes in each. The pieces were arranged three centimeters apart from each other on the floor of MoCA Taipei’s exhibition space, and re-formed the original shape of the tree whilst extending its length to ten meters. Fifty sewing needles with red thread as each strand went through each hole connecting all the lying pieces together. An extra five feet of thread was left at each end of the tree trunk with all the needles at one end.
In my native land Taiwan, the color red is a symbol of joy and celebration, yet here in my installation red is used to stand for veins. This tree, lying in a cold, artificial environment, rather than quietly decomposing in nature, is held together by vulnerable red sewing thread, a symbol of human exploitation and a warning for danger of deforestation.
