Project by Alex Ching-Chen Liu (@alexdoublechen), Juke Jose (@jukestaposition)

“The communities along the southwest coast of Taiwan, particularly in Chiayi County, are experiencing sea level rise at rates significantly higher than the global average, due to global warming and climate change.1 In addition to rising seas, excessive groundwater extraction, primarily from aquaculture and rice farming, has led to severe land subsidence and widespread land salinization.2 This project investigates how ecological and infrastructural crises driven by human activity heighten environmental vulnerability, producing conditions of land loss and the displacement of both human and non-human populations and communities.

The project begins with Wangliao Village, Dongshi Township, Chiayi County, a photograph from the series Submerged Beauty of Formosa by Shun-Fa Yang, the crises evoked through the image, and an analysis of the technique of photo-stitching and the use of the Claude glass as a framing device. The image serves as a point of departure for a broader inquiry, facilitated by the introduction of spatial data, mapping studies, and research, which are then translated into expanded images, cartographies, and models.

The work expands the image through the reinterpretation of Yang’s photograph, highlighting remnants of submerged villages, lost landscapes, and disappearing infrastructures in a timeline of projections in photo-stitched satellite images. The expanded maps trace relationships between salinated water, groundwater, and speculative cross-contaminations; land subsidence and flooding projections tied to land use, projecting the imminent futures of the land through cartography. A condensed site section presents human and non-human adaptations in the context of the ongoing crisis affecting land–water landscapes. This situated resilience becomes a critical cue for imagining near-future habitation in the region. The expanded model, comprising architecture, infrastructure, and non-human representations, reveals the dynamics of extractive practices and their effects at a more intimate and focused scale through a geological interpretation of the site. Photo-stitched imaging sets a backdrop for the model, shifting stage views of land–water entanglements. Together, the collection of images threads a multimedia installation that confronts the urgency of Chiayi County’s environmental crisis, while inviting a broader dialogue on climate-induced displacement, ecological loss, and imaging and imagining possible futures of coastal regions worldwide.

For more on sea level rise here, see Tai-Wen Hsu, Lin Tsung-Yi, and Tseng I-Fan. “Human Impact on Coastal Erosion in Taiwan,” in Journal of Coastal Research 23 (4), 2007 and C.H. Lu, and Y.J. Chen’s, “A Protocol Analysis of Urban Population Spatial Distribution under Rising Sea Levels: A Case Example of Tainan City, Taiwan.” WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment 133 (May), 2007.

Wei Chia Hung, et al. “Land Subsidence in Chiayi, Taiwan, from Compaction Well, Leveling and ALOS/PALSAR: Aquaculture-Induced Relative Sea Level Rise,” in Remote Sensing 10 (2), 2017: 40–40, and Erik Rivas, Mahmud Haghighi, Mahdi Montagh, Jyr-Ching Hu, and Shao-Hung Lin’s “Land Subsidence Analysis in Taipei Basin, Taiwan, Integrating Sentinel-1 InSAR, Groundwater and Rainfall Data.” In EGU General Assembly 2025. ”