Chaong-Wen Ting

Chaong-Wen Ting, born and living in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, works with mixed media including sound and image installations. His artistic practice employs an archaeological approach, traversing the space between fact and fiction to establish novel connections between historical events and explore cultural collective memory across borders. Ting’s research traces how materials move through nature, industry, and technology, as demonstrated in his previous work on salt, clay, and silicon in southern Taiwan. He was awarded the Taoyuan International Art Award Grand Prize in 2021. His work has been exhibited globally at venues including Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Bauhaus Museum Weimar, and the Taipei Biennial, and is held in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Ting approaches a site as a dynamic system shaped by water, energy, infrastructure, and living beings. He utilizes fieldwork as an active methodology to shift the artist’s role from merely observing a place to tracing the relational flows within it. His practice follows material trajectories—such as the chain from mine to mineral, semiconductor, data center, and computational power—making concealed infrastructures tangible. Understanding landscapes as multispecies environments, Ting examines how human interventions redistribute survival conditions for all forms of life. Through embodied field research, sound, moving image, material sampling, mapping, and spatial installation, his method reveals hidden connections between ecology, technology, and territory.

The project uses the watershed of the Rhine–Meuse border region as both a geographical and methodological framework. Taking the Garzweiler mining area as a key starting point, Ting investigates how post-lignite ecological restoration and engineered hydrological systems challenge the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. The residency establishes a transregional dialogue with southern Taiwan, treating both areas as parallel sites shaped by extraction, water management, and technological shift. By tracing the material infrastructure behind digital society, Ting builds a multispecies watershed archive through fieldwork, sound, moving image, mapping, and material experiments, questioning how artistic research must adapt to changing landscapes.