消失的飛鼠

The Vanishing Flying Squirrels

Rngrang Hungul x Flying Squirrel Girls (TSAI Ya-chu x WU Yu-han x SU Yu-hsuan x Yang Yi)

About the Work

Based in Cayamavana Village along the Zeng-wen River Basin, this project traces the spiritual eyes that "mass-migrated" due to commercial forestry practices. Observing an orderly yet lifeless man-made landscape at an altitude of 900 meters, the creators question how the sacred ecological contract with nature fractured when tourism value dismantled the squirrels' gliding pathways. The vanishing of flying squirrels stems not only from light pollution and habitat colonization, but also from the erosion of internal tribal taboos and traditional rules. When the ancient pact between hunter and land fails, the luminous forest falls silent. Guided by hunter Basuya, the team uses a mixed-media video installation to carve a path of "imaginative return" through the haze of modern civilization. Translating physical nocturnal fieldwork into an immersive performance, the work serves as both an elegy for the missing squirrels and an artistic pilgrimage, rekindling flames in the quiet night to rediscover the gliding trail deep into the ancestral forest.

About the Artist

Rngrang Hungul: A Truku visual artist whose practice is grounded in deep field research. A graduate of National Dong Hwa University's Department of Indigenous Languages and Communication, she acts as both visual recorder and local cultural interpreter. Through her lens, she engages in a profound cultural dialectic within the crevices between contemporary social structures and traditional tribal norms. Her work fuses the weight of documentary depth with the tension of experimental art, and in recent years, she has increasingly translated the physical sensations of her fieldwork into video installations and written texts—stitching together Truku women's life histories while building a sensory visual narrative for contemporary Indigenous women. Flying Squirrel Girls: A group of young creators and researchers from the Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art at National Kaohsiung Normal University. Alongside their personal research, they share a passion for ecological reading and Indigenous experiences. Learning that hunters across Taiwan had noticed a dramatic decline in flying squirrel populations, they followed in hunter Basuya Yakumangana's footsteps into the middle and upper reaches of the Zeng-wen River, tracking the squirrels through faint sounds, tree canopies, and claw marks. They are currently conducting a long-term re-encounter project in the forest near Cayamavana Village.