I-Ying Liu

Wang Yu-Song, a self-proclaimed “extreme introvert,” speaks incessantly when the conversation turns to his artistic practice and his hometown, Hualien.

During a day packed with back-to-back schedules, we visited his two studios in Hualien, the Beibin seaside where he often spaces out, his high school campus, the Hualien County Museum of Art and Qixingtan where his works are exhibited, the Guofu Construction Residual Treatment Plant, where his Earthquake Sketching Group made their first sketching project, and the “Water Source,” a creek where he has swam since childhood.

Our conversation shuttled between the mountains and seas of Hualien and Wang’s childhood memories; as the recorder’s timeline started and stopped, I felt as though I was stepping into the artist’s “garden of life,” walking through the intricate, intertwined labyrinth of his thoughts.

Wang was planning our schedule for the day at a brunch place.

The First Sleepless Night

Since childhood, Wang has been undeniably bound to art. His father passed away early due to illness, and though his open-minded mother was not financially well-off, she first used an unexpected insurance payout to take her two children on a journey across Taiwan.

After returning to Hualien, she sent Wang and his sister to various talent classes, including rollerblading, diabolo, music, painting, and ceramics. Wang, who lacked a sense of pitch, was quickly “returned” by his music teacher, but he found infinite joy and a sense of achievement in painting and pottery.

Having loved drawing since childhood, he happened to grow up in an era when painting and sketching competitions were being held in great numbers, springing up like mushrooms. With his mother busy running her business, he would follow his aunt’s family to competitions, playing along while taking part in them.

Although he often placed behind his more technically skilled cousin, his evident talent still earned him a considerable amount of pocket money. Even the PS2 and PSP that every child envied at the time were “earned” through his own sketches.

Unlike the occasional fatigue he felt from over-competing in painting, Wang’s experience with ceramics was one of pure enjoyment and passion. His open-minded pottery teacher never restricted his themes or techniques, allowing the young Wang to freely explore the medium.

While chatting, we flipped through the portfolio he prepared for university applications, and an installation piece caught our eye: a small boy stepping forward while turning his head back to look behind him. Wang said that at the time, he inexplicably wanted to create “footprints” but didn’t know how to express them.

He agonized over it for a long time, even losing sleep for several nights. Although he doesn’t quite remember the specific process, he noted, “That felt like the first time I truly felt I was ‘making art.’” He immersed himself in the memory, speaking with pride about this work that has never been publicly shown. The year was 2006; we did the math and realized Wang was twelve years old then.

Wang Yu-song’s ceramic sculpture Return (2006) was included in his university application portfolio. The original work is still at his family home but cannot currently be found.

Having gained entry into Taiwan’s art-track class system through examinations in the second grade of elementary school, Wang Yu-song continued to benefit from the system as an implicit gifted-track structure and a protective buffer, progressing all the way through junior high school.

However, when selecting a high school, his academic ranking happen to fall within the teachers’ “enrollment quota achievements,” leading him to Hualien Senior High School, which only offered general classes.

The young Wang did not give it much thought at the time, but over three years he drifted from the second track (science/engineering) to the third track (medicine/biology), before finally returning to the first track (liberal arts). As the major exams approached, he considered what he might be good at and ultimately decided to apply to art schools.

To prepare for the exams, Wang signed up for art studio classes and practiced hard with a group of like-minded friends. During the final weeks of the sprint, they simulated the official exam schedule and simply slept at the studio.

Their teacher at the time, Huang Jheng-Ciang, who was then studying at the Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) and commuting between Taipei and Hualien to teach, along with his peers Wu Yu and Hsu Li-Hsuan, remain close partners today. Following the 2024 Hualien earthquake, they joined Wang’s call to document their hometown’s transformation through drawing, then becoming core members of the “Earthquake Sketching Group.”

The art studio where Wang used to take classes is now one of his studio spaces.

The Polar Extremes of an Aquarius

Wang , who majored in printmaking at TNUA, admitted that he didn’t have many creative breakthroughs during his four years of university and wasn’t very good at “thinking” about things. Consequently, he decided to change his environment for graduate school and attended the remote Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA).

“During my first month at TNNUA, I started thinking about some very fundamental questions,” Wang explained. Perhaps due to the professors and the environment, he began pondering the meaning and reason for the existence of all beings, often sitting under a tree spacing out all day. Although the campus surroundings were mostly pure natural scenery, he already felt overloaded with information.

If the Wang Yu-song in Taipei was always running outward, the one in Tainan began to return to himself. He brought out all the information he had consumed from seeing numerous exhibitions in Taipei but had failed to digest, and rethought it all; he also slowly read many literary works to help himself think.

While conceiving his final project for the first year of graduate school, physical memories from high school flashed back. He remembered staring at the sea during class, an experience that overlapped across time with the writer Yang Mu, who attended the same school, as well as the “Hualien White Lighthouse” in Yang’s writing, which had fascinated him but had long been destroyed during port expansion.

The project to find the ruins of the “Hualien White Lighthouse” ultimately ended in failure. The lighthouse never appeared; all that remained was footage of him struggling in the undercurrents to draw the lighthouse’s outline and a steel plate scratched beyond recognition.

But Wang didn’t care much. He realized that the core of the project, rooted in the idea of “sketching,” lay not in the object itself, but in the process of approaching it through drawing, thereby stimulating imagination and possibility. That work gave him a taste of what it means to create, and with Hualien White Lighthouse, he went on to win the Grand Prize at the 2017 Taipei Art Awards.

Film still of Hualien White Lighthouse, 2017, courtesy of the artist.

The years following the award could be described as an explosion in his artistic output, with constant invitations from art festivals and galleries, and the solo exhibition promised by the Taipei Art Award needing to be completed within three years.

Looking back retrospectively at his state then, Wang, a whimsical Aquarius, uses the word “extreme” to describe it. Through reading psychology books, he suspects he may have been troubled by a mild “bipolar disorder” (cyclothymia); the fluctuations between his “manic” and “depressive” states were so large that he could not control them.

While Wang Yu-Song was satisfied with the final outcomes of his solo exhibitions “Being in Both Formosa” at Yiri Arts and “Garden” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the preparation process was fraught with hardship. Particularly while conceiving “Garden,” as the deadline for the solo exhibition proposal approached, Wang only had interests in concepts like “archaeology” and “labyrinths” but could not push them forward into a concrete plan.

Incredibly anxious, he would head to TFAM almost every night around midnight. He biked, took the MRT, and even followed the riverbank from north to south to investigate the Tamsui River, before circling the museum’s exterior after closing time (accompanied only by the security guards and the light from the Director’s office). When he was too tired to go back to Tamsui, he would sleep in an internet cafe near Taipei Main Station.

After much struggle, he was struck by inspiration while looking at a tension rod in his restroom. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ concept of a labyrinth in The Garden of Forking Paths, he transformed the form people usually expect to walk into, into an installation where spheres roll on a track. This used dynamic movement to stir the viewer’s visual and auditory perception, projecting their consciousness into this “moving labyrinth.”

At that time, he barely slept for an entire month. By day, he installed the exhibition at the museum; by night, he rushed to TNUA to produce lithographs documenting his research process. Operating entirely on his own, he also had to coordinate more than a dozen production contractors, work with mechanical engineering experts on the design of a motorized track installation, and secure significant sponsorship resources, as both his artistic ambition and the pandemic-driven surge in material costs intensified the project’s demands.

Installation views of “Garden” at the TFAM, 2021, courtesy of the artist.

He later reflected that, when preparing for exhibitions, he often moved into a “manic” state: productivity surged, energy felt inexhaustible, and sleep became minimal, as if he had turned superhuman. This would be followed by a “depressive” swing, when he would drop suddenly into a low, sleeping for more than twenty hours, staying at home, and withdrawing from any activity.

During his graduate studies, these two extremes cycled over spans of six months to a year. Ultimately, the death of his beloved grandmother, combined with being stuck on his thesis, brought Wang to a point of collapse.

Becoming Wang Yu-song’s Number One Fan

During his lowest period in 2023, Wang moved back to Hualien after his lease expired. He turned down all exhibition invitations to focus on his thesis, but the artist statement titled “The Painter” could never be completed or submitted, and he ultimately failed to graduate. Drive to dead end, he worked as a delivery rider for over three months to sustain himself, while slowly coming to terms with his regrets in the embrace of the mountains and sea, and gradually healing.

On the day of the interview, we paused midstream in Fenglin Creek, where he used to swim with his grandparents. Thinking back on that period, he pointed to the woods near the Water Source and said, “When I was at my lowest point, I would head into the mountains, following footprints and walking along paths used by hunters.”

Wang Yu-song spoke with great familiarity as he introduced the ferns growing beside the Water Source.

After recounting this grueling journey, Wang immediately added: “I don’t regret it at all; I don’t regret doing any of those exhibitions.” From the outset, his works have remained within the realm of “painting,” yet they are often presented as spatial installations rather than flat surfaces, while also incorporating the element of “time” and foregrounding “action” as a creative process.

Every time he looks back at his past works, Wang feels as though he is flipping through and reading a diary of a certain stage of his life, only he doesn’t describe his feelings through writing; rather, he makes memories three-dimensional by reproducing physical perceptions.

In 2024, Wang resumed his artistic practice following an invitation from curator Eva Lin. A residency in Jinguashi offered him a change of environment, allowing him to gradually emerge from that low period and rediscover the joy of making art.

During our interview, he also recalled that his first experience of finding art-making enjoyable stemmed from a 2022 residency at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Scotland. Over those three months, he cycled every day, observing and sketching. His creative energy no longer relied on external pressure such as deadlines; instead, he felt like a sponge, continuously absorbing and being nourished, with ideas for works emerging naturally.

He had experienced a similar sense of purity during the 2020 Art Festival of Siangshan Wetland, when he used the concept of set nets to anchor multiple spherical installations covered in shells and sea sand onto the ocean surface. As the tide rose and fell, the relationship between the spheres and the sea shifted accordingly. Wang said that whenever he had time, he would go to the beach to look at the work: “Because the audience that looks forward to the work the most is myself.”

Part of what he displayed at the Art Festival of Siangshan Wetland now finds a home by Qixingtan.

Wang Yu-song continues to look back through time, sifting through his own practices and attempting to recalibrate himself. In the summer of 2025, alongside continuing the investigative actions of the Earthquake Sketching Group with his collaborators, he gradually adjusts his daily routine in preparation for teaching at Hualien Girls’ Senior High School in September.

Having said goodbye to the fluctuations of previous years, Wang hopes that a more regular lifestyle through teaching will help slowly regain both physical and mental stability for himself and his practice. Perhaps this small path, unexpectedly branching once again in the garden of life, is also accumulating a creative energy yet to be revealed.

*This text was originally published in 台新銀行文化藝術基金會 ARTalks（080靈）通話藝術家專欄 (中文版).