I suppose I could feel the roots.” (Le Guin 22)
Today, reading the discourse on Heideggerian philosophy that arose across the East Asian maritime region from the 1930s to 1970s, I noticed a transit node—the very island where we are now (remember that ‘East Asia’ was a term coined by Europeans). Heidegger’s idea of “dwelling,” like a seed, took root and grew into a tropical rainforest…Despite subsequent scholars criticizing Heidegger’s political actions, he stated: “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature.” Dwelling transcends simply occupying land or space; it involves creating a space where exiles, settlers, voyagers, and missionaries can live—and live together. Only then can true freedom exist. (Lin Chen-Kuo 178)
Introduction
Curated by Hsu Fang-Tze, the exhibition Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) features work by thirteen artists who address complex issues through diverse sound-related media. It includes Chinese ink scrolls, bioelectrodes, field recordings, and research on both historical and ongoing sonic warfare. The works aim to foster dialogue with material conditions and environmental contexts. Central to the exhibition is the concept of “attunement,” which encompasses both acoustic phenomena and metaphorical processes of expanding perception, listening, and active engagement. “Attunement” emphasizes that “the way we listen shapes how we share the world,” prompting the curator to ask further: “In an era marked by significant environmental challenges, polycrisis, hyper-connectivity, and shifting geopolitical landscapes, how do we attune our bodies and minds with our uncertain surroundings?” (Hsu Fang-Tze)
Because “attunement” involves engaging the practice of both body and mind, it depends on three main curatorial threads: “The Listening Air,” “The Hearing Water,” and “The Hearkening Earth.” These curatorial threads are grounded in the material elements of “wind, water, and earth,” which create an implicit dialectical tension with Watsuji Tetsurō’s (1889–1960) concept of “Fūdo” (Climate and Culture).[1] The curator begins her statement with Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) metaphor of clouds drifting across the landscape, a reflection that resonates with the recent rediscovery in Taiwanese academia of the philosophical traditions from the period of Japanese rule that were influenced by Continental thought. Among these is Hung Yao-Hsun’s (1903–1986) “Fūdo Bunkakan” (Climate Cultural View), which represents the effort of Taiwanese intellectuals to develop a subjective discourse on local “particularity” in the 1930s. Drawing on Watsuji’s philosophical work Fūdo (風土——人間學的考查), which examines how environmental conditions shape a community, they aimed to identify the foundational principles upon which individuals or communities can stand.[2] With this in mind, within the framework of the relationship between human existence and the environment, the artistic practices of “attunement” in dialogue with Continental philosophy within the exhibition can perhaps be reinterpreted—the idea of “Fūdo” in this case neither seeks the universalism Watsuji pursues nor ignores the modern political issues facing Asia.
Just as Karl Löwith (1897–1973), Hung Yao-Hsun, and postwar immigrant scholar Mou Tsung-San (1909–1995) engaged with Heideggerian philosophy, exploring the historical paths of modern philosophy on the island helps us better understand the perspectives of the exiled, colonized, or diasporic. This approach offers clues to the aesthetic practice of “how to dwell.”[3] Focusing on artists Chen Ting-Jung, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Kei Imazu, Bagus Pandega, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Yuan Jai, and Yu Cheng-Yao, this essay examines connections between Heideggerian thought and the island to analyze how these artists address the exhibition’s inquiry by critiquing climatic and cultural landscapes that craft a perceptible space for personal “reassurance and stability” through the “attunement” of their works.
Chen Ting-Jung, You Are the Only One I Care About (whisper), 2018, Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Soundscapes of Occupation
Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape centers on soundscapes, so many artists begin with sound installations or technologies to explore how individuals or communities relate to their environments through listening. Reflecting on Taiwan’s radio and acoustic discipline under colonial rule, Chen Ting-Jung’s You Are the Only One I Care About (whisper) looks back at the shift from shouting confrontations during the 823 Artillery Battle to gentle whispers in Kinmen, symbolizing Taiwan’s involuntary history for decades. Starting in 1937, after the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, Seizō Kobayashi (小林躋造), Taiwan’s 17th Governor-General, aggressively promoted “Kominka (Japanization), industrialization, and transforming Taiwan into a base for southern expansion,” turning the island into a strategic advance base for the imminent warfare. After the war, in 1950, Chiang Kai-Shek announced the political slogan: “Prepare in one year, counterattack in two, sweep out in three, succeed in five.” During the First Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1954 and the US-led evacuation from Dachen Island to Taiwan, the Kinmen and Matsu Islands became Cold War military frontlines, constantly monitored through speech surveillance and under the fear of espionage—where phrases like “Be careful, the walls have ears!” became a tangible auditory threat.
As described in the curatorial thread of “The Listening Air,” which explores how airborne frequencies are weaponized and how listening functions as a tool of political will (Hsu Fang-Tze), Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Wind Ensemble also treats sound as a form of testimony. The work features footage of Amr Mdah, a saxophonist from the Jawlani community, improvising on a “kookh” (a traditional Jawlani shelter) and projecting onto the mesh surface of a set of bass speakers, symbolizing the psychological state of a population under occupation. This scene exemplifies resistance to Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights and the construction of 31 wind turbines. In the Middle East—an epicenter of modern international conflicts—listening amid occupation and resistance becomes a battlefield of conflicting forces.[4] While such hostile realities have not yet become part of local daily life, this alienation of the landscape reveals the challenge of “dwelling,” hinting at a future that might ultimately be inevitable for Taiwan.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Wind Ensemble, 2024, Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Heidegger’s analysis of the ontological framework of “being-in-the-world” suggests that the world is not merely an object of human perception, thought, or action, but is instead the arena where humans perceive, think, and act. Yet he did not clearly state that beneath the notions of “freedom” and “peace” in his idea of “dwelling” lies “a recurring history of threats, violence, and disasters that lead to ‘homelessness.’” (Lin Chen-Kuo 155). Under this philosophical lens, the Jewish refugee Löwith and the colonized Taiwanese scholar Hung Yao-Hsun channeled their fates of exile and colonization into their respective interpretations of Heidegger’s philosophy, finding a shared intersection.[5]
The Justification of Fūdo
The exhibition also questions the often-overlooked concept of “Fūdo.” In 47 Days, Sound-less, a distinctive three-channel projection installation featuring eight circular mirrors suspended above and dual screens facing front and back, the artist Nguyen Trinh Thi draws inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi novel The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and her sci-fi story “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971). The work’s title alludes to the walking time from Vietnam’s Central Highlands to the filming site of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) in the Philippines. The artist notes that Hollywood directors often used field recordings from outside Vietnam to build the narrative of jungle warfare. In this work, sounds of insects, birds, and dripping water from films are brought to the foreground alongside footage of the Jarai and Ifugao peoples preparing rituals in the Central Highlands. This contrast fosters landscape imagination through eight oval, branch-like image structures. Kei Imazu and Bagus Pandega’s Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.3 examines imagery of southern climatic and cultural landscapes constructed by the Japanese colonial regime. Using imagery of Taipei Imperial University’s main gate and palm-lined avenue, it shows classical architecture nestled within a lush landscape of coconut palms. Biometric data collected weekly from potted king sago palms drives a robotic arm to repeatedly spray green dye onto the mural landscape or remove parts of it.
Nguyen Trinh Thi, 47 Days, Sound-less, 2024, Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
In the historical context of Taiwan’s southern landscape, coconut palms became prominent through Japan’s interpretation of Fūdo as part of its “external territory” (Taiwan). Chou Hsiang-Yun (2012) highlights that Tashiro Yasusada was among the first officials at the Government-General of Taiwan’s Bureau of Productive Industry to shape the southern landscape by planting coconut trees.[6]
After examining Europe and arguing that Taiwan’s tropical climate (between 22°–25°N) should be compared with Western imperial “South Seas colonies” for street-tree landscaping, Tashiro concluded that the palm family (Arecaceae) was ideal for transplantation to Taiwan, given its climate compatibility, aesthetic appeal, and typhoon resistance. Liao Hsin-Tien further states that “like a piece of paper, landscape is shaped through a repeated process of coding and recoding by political desire and cultural intentions, making them hybrid spaces of reality and imagination” (Liao Hsin-Tien 201–203). Palm imagery served as tropical markers of the colony and as a feature of objectification. However, these traits also embodied the self-representation of Fūdo in local consciousness. For instance, Hung Yao-Hsun’s 1936 “Fūdo Bunkakan” (Climate Cultural View), which continued Watsuji Tetsurō’s idea of the inseparability of humans and Fūdo, offered a way to build Taiwanese subjective consciousness.[7] It was precisely within this framework that the postwar Royal Palm Boulevard became a symbol of Taiwan’s leading educational institution.
Kei Imazu and Bagus Pandega, Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.3, 2025 (Itineration in 2026), Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Imazu and Pandega’s mechanical approach involving repeatedly spraying and erasing the landscape not only highlights colonial memory but also demonstrates how Fūdo justifies itself through this construction process. Similarly, Nguyen Trinh Thi’s sci-fi Fūdo, which reappropriates Hollywood film soundscapes, moves beyond critique to show care for marginalized groups. Just as Hung Yao-Hsun shifted from the perspective of “being-in-the-world” to discuss the topic of “coexisting with others in a shared world,” this sense of “community” already carries a political implication that goes beyond Heideggerian philosophy.[8]
From Diaspora to Dwelling
While the colonialism explored by the artists mentioned mostly looks back to history, Hajra Waheed’s A Letter From My Sister, November 16, 2015 focuses on a letter from her sister written after the state of emergency was declared following the November 13 terrorist attacks in France that year, illustrating the experience of being the “other” amid ongoing mechanisms of justified violence. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Zifzafa: A Livestream Audio Essay emulates the digital style of video game streamers, constantly moving across an alienated landscape stripped of subjectivity, set within a 3D-recreated Golan Heights. Reena Saini Kallat’s River Boundaries Break the Sound of Silence Between Them fuses electrical wires symbolizing division with different river segments, reweaving boundaries between political entities into a poetic collective narrative. These contemporary practices remind us of the core question in the philosophy of “dwelling”: How can we live or find peace within the changing flux of Fūdo through practices of “attunement” that transcend a single sense?
Yuan Jai, Shifting Hills, 2000, Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Yuan Jai, born in Chongqing in 1941 and relocated to Taiwan with her family, worked as an art conservator at the National Palace Museum for three decades. Her work Shifting Hills is a shanshui landscape painting that conveys a sense of “movement” through rhythmic lines. Drawing on both traditional Chinese landscape art and Western modernism, her work, in fact, depicts the traumatic memories of the 1999 Jiji Earthquake. Here, we see the shift of the shanshui genre and the transformation of personal experience, as traditional literati techniques are rendered as dynamic, plastic forms that resonate with the viewer’s movement. Yu Cheng-Yao’s (1898–1993) three paintings—Landscape, Overlapping Mountains, and A Precipitously Elevated Mountain—evoke a very different sentiment about life. This Fujian-born artist, who taught himself to paint at age 56, gradually built his mountain scenes, using “dense texture strokes” to create each layer. When exhibited alongside three acrylic paintings by Lin Chi-Wei, they are said to create a “synesthetic” experience that blends sensory perceptions. For Yu Cheng-Yao, whether through continuous, musical-like brushwork or theories about Nanguan music rooted in his mindset, both expressions represent a longing for his ancestral home in Yongchun, Fujian, rather than attachment to his immediate surroundings.
In other words, by creating synesthetic landscapes that blend hearing and sight, the artist seems able to briefly revisit an “ancestral home beyond time.” At the same time, Yuan Jai’s depiction of shifting hills suggests that “Fūdo” might vary in response to personal experience.
Key visual of Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape, © Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Conclusion
Whether exploring abstract existence through landscape or challenging disciplined reality, “Yue” (樂, music) and “Yi” (藝, art) in the Confucian tradition have long been linked to “self-governance”—as seen in the Neo-Confucian idea of “wandering in the arts” (遊於藝): art is not an escape from reality but a form of re-settling life. It is important to note that Heidegger’s thinking on technology suggests it has a true sense of aletheia (unconcealment or truth), while Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) reminds us that the aesthetic experience created by computational machines through “simulation” always carries the history of war. Thus, art that digitally mimics experience probably cannot fully avoid its inherent contradictions.[9]
The ultimate question of this essay is: if artists cannot choose their ancestral homeland, can they eventually choose their Fūdo? If they cannot choose their Fūdo, is it possible to create it through art? Perhaps Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape reveals the different choices artists make when faced with the challenge of “dwelling.” “Attunement” functions both as a form of “dwelling” and as a metaphor for reconstructing “Fūdo.” Therefore, how the philosophy of Fūdo is accepted and interpreted in Taiwan offers another perspective for understanding how artists reconsider the idea of “dwelling.” —[SCR]
[1] Watsuji Tetsurō, trans. Chen Li-Wei, Fūdo (Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2018). ↩
[2] Lin Chin-Li, “Self, Other and Community: A Discussion on Hung Yao-Hsun’s ‘Fudo Bunkakan: Taiwan Fudo No Renkan Ni Oite.’” Taiwan Literature Studies, no. 1 (April 2007): 73–107. ↩
[3] In recent years, scholars have examined how Continental philosophy was introduced to prewar Taiwan through Japanese academic circles. Japanese philosophers such as Watsuji Tetsurō, Tanabe Hajime, Kuki Shūzō, and Nishitani Keiji integrated early Heideggerian ideas, forming the most significant wave of Heideggerian influence outside Germany. When Karl Löwith visited Taiwan, Hung Yao-Hsun had already published “Fudo Bunkakan: Taiwan Fudo No Renkan Ni Oite” (“Climate Cultural View: Its Relation to Taiwanese Climate,” 1936), which demonstrated his engagement with Heideggerian philosophy. See: Lin, Chen-Kuo. “Sailing Past the Island—When Karl Löwith, Hung Yao-hsun, Mou Tsung-san, and Tang Chun-i Met Heidegger.” In Thinking a Philosophy of Co-Becoming Across the Strait, by Yang Rur-Bin, Wang Chih-Ming, Teng Yu-Jen, Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Lin Chen-Kuo, Chuang Chia-Wei, and Mark Frederick McConaghy, 156. Taipei: Wunan Book Publishing, 2026.↩
[4] Lin Chin-Li, “Self, Other and Community: A Discussion on Hung Yao-Shun’s ‘Fudo Bunkakan: Taiwan Fudo No Renkan Ni Oite.’” Taiwan Literature Studies, no. 1 (April 2007): 73–107. ↩
[5] Lin, Chen-Kuo. “Sailing Past the Island—When Karl Löwith, Hung Yao-hsun, Mou Tsung-san, and Tang Chun-i Met Heidegger,” 149–179. ↩
[6] It should be noted that the terms coconut and betel palm have different semantic ranges in Japanese and Chinese. In short, “coconut” originally referred to Cocos nucifera, but after Japanese colonization, it came to broadly denote plants in the Arecaceae family, or palms. In Japan, “betel palm” and “palm tree” were sometimes used interchangeably, as when Horiguchi Daigaku translated Paul Valéry’s “Palme” as “Betel Palm.” See: Bun-ki Tenn, A Cross-Ethnic Study of Modern Taiwanese Poetry: Cultural Landscapes Centered on the Betel Palm (Master’s thesis, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Culture, National Taipei University of Education, 2026), 11–12. ↩
[7] Liao Chin-Ping, “Watsuji Tetsuro’s Philosophy of Fudo—And the Subsequent ‘Fudo’ Philosophies of Hong Yao-xun and Augustin Berque,” 83–84. ↩
[8] Lin, Chen-Kuo. “Sailing Past the Island—When Karl Löwith, Hung Yao-hsun, Mou Tsung-san, and Tang Chun-i Met Heidegger,” 162. ↩
[9] This does not reject artistic simulation with computational machines but instead points out that whether artistic practices that critique reality through simulation can be separated from the violence of war should be considered. See: Hsieh Chieh-Ting, Lee Li-Chun, and Sing Song-Yong, eds., Contemporary Texts: Technics (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2025), 199–201. ↩
References
Hung, Yao-Hsun. Selected Papers of Hung Yao-Hsun. Edited and proofread by Liao Chin-Ping, translated by Lin Hui-Chun. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2019.
Hsu, Fang-Tze. “Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape” (Curatorial Statement). Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Website).
Liao, Hsin-Tien. “Beautiful Nature and Tragic Nature: A Humanistic Reading of the Colonial Taiwanese Landscape—A Comparison between Visual Art and Literature.” In The Empire on Taiwan: Time, Space, Knowledge, and Sentiment of Colonial Taiwan, edited by Li Chen-Chi and Lee Yu-Lin, 201–236. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2015.
Lin, Chen-Kuo. “Sailing Past the Island—When Karl Löwith, Hung Yao-hsun, Mou Tsung-san, and Tang Chun-i Met Heidegger.” In Thinking a Philosophy of Co-Becoming Across the Strait, by Yang Rur-Bin, Wang Chih-Ming, Teng Yu-Jen, Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Lin Chen-Kuo, Chuang Chia-Wei, and Mark Frederick McConaghy, 149–179. Taipei: Wunan Book Publishing, 2026.
Lin, Chin-Li. “Self, Other and Community: A Discussion on Hung Yao-Hsun’s ‘Fudo Bunkakan: Taiwan Fudo No Renkan Ni Oite.’” Taiwan Literature Studies, no. 1 (April 2007): 73–107.
