Contemporary Taiwan exists in a critical, unique position in its relations with China and the world. On the one hand, it continues to double, officially, as the Republic of China—the rivaling government of China since the founding of the People's Republic of China. On the other, it boasts an identity very much distinct from China’s that includes the cultures of Indigenous peoples as well as colonial legacies from Dutch outposts in the mid-seventeenth century to Japanese rule in the first half of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, Taiwan was freed from the fifty-year colonial rule of imperial Japan, only to be governed under the brutal one-party rule of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Ultimately, however, democratic movements in the 1980s and 1990s led to free and direct presidential elections in 1996, and, ever since, Taiwan has been a thriving island democracy with a vibrant public sphere for liberal progressive values. For example, in 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.
As such, Taiwan, (mainland) China, and Hong Kong (which has its own legacy of British colonialism and Western values) are home to three competing cultural spheres with separate laws, different vocabularies, and, most importantly, distinct identities. Crossing the borders between these similar but incommensurable territories can often feel like entering parallel universes within what could have been one society under different circumstances. Zheng Bo's traversals between the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan thus inform his fascination with the questioning and queering of Taiwan as an environment—from Taiwanese ferns to Taiwanese men. Referencing Taiwan's colonial history, ecology, and its liberal atmosphere through its quasi-fantastical subject matter, Pteridophilia is an ongoing video and installation project through which Zheng provocatively explores human-plant relations. Depicting both verdant ferns and nude male actors with erotic tension and engaged in intimate and vulnerable contact, the video work from which these stills are excerpted overlays multispecies subjectivities and a decolonizing project in a historically complex context of colonial inequality. It points to Taiwan as fertile ground for complicating assumptions about its past as a land and society and its future as an imagined progressive polity. As Taiwan becomes a significant linchpin for global geopolitics, it also becomes ever more crucial for the world to focus on Taiwan and think with and alongside it in critical times.
Artist Statement
When I, a Chinese mainlander living in Hong Kong, went to Taiwan in 2016, I quickly noticed that ferns are everywhere, from street corners to forest canopies. I learned that Taiwan is a hotspot for ferns. With more than seven hundred identified species growing over an area of thirty-six thousand square kilometers, Taiwan boasts the highest fern species density in the world.
Yet when Japanese colonialists occupied Taiwan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they paid little attention to ferns. They were busy expanding sugar plantations. Japanese artists in Taiwan turned their gaze to the island's many subtropical flowers, like hibiscus, oleander, and ti plants, and painted them enthusiastically. But in March 1945, when the Japanese group Taiwan Plant Club (台灣植物同好會 Tai wan zhi wu tong hao hui) published Taiwan Wild Edible Plants Album (台灣野生食用植物圖譜 Tai wan ye sheng shi yong zhi wu tu pu) “in support of the imperial war on food,” ferns suddenly became important: the first six entries were all ferns! The colonialists finally realized what Indigenous peoples had known all along: that ferns are the most abundant source of food in Taiwan's forests.
I wanted to get closer to ferns. In college a Malaysian friend once told me that the quickest way to get to know someone is to have sex with them. And I have always wanted to push the boundary into erotic film. With the help of a theater producer I met on Tinder, I found six male performers, assembled a small crew, and shot the first chapter of Pteridophilia in a forest located on the edge of Taipei where the scientists from the National University collected fern samples.
Initially I was annoyed when some friends labeled this film tongzhi, Chinese for LGBTQ. Equating the representation of naked male bodies with gayness is so old-fashioned! Then I realized that they were almost right, not because it featured naked men, but because of ferns. Ferns are queer plants. One generation produces spores, and the next generation produces eggs and sperm.
Since then I have been going back to the same forest in Taiwan every year to shoot a new chapter of the film. I have shot five chapters thus far. In chapter 2, Jing-Yan makes love to a bird's nest fern (Asplenium nidus) and then starts devouring it. In chapter 3, three BDSM practitioners play with three fern species—green penny fern (Lemmaphyllum microphyllum), flying spider-monkey tree fern (Cyathea spinulosa), and elephant fern (Angiopteris palmiformis)—to expand their BDSM repertoire. Chapter 4 features two beautiful young men frolicking with beautiful young fronds. Chapter 5 explores spores alongside the microscopic textures of male genitalia. It has been such a fun project to get to know Taiwan's ecological world and to imagine how plants could help us decolonize our minds and bodies. It continues to unfurl.
