盲蛇的氣味記憶

Scent Memories of the Blind Snake

Frank Bloem

About the Work

Frank Bloem (b. 1978) was born in the Dutch city of Haarlem. He studied Visual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating from the Rietveld Academy in 2007, he worked for seven years as a visual artist, creating art installations with mixed media. In 2014, he discovered scent as a medium for his art and decided to focus his practice on working with it. This led, in 2016, to the establishment of The Snifferoo, a laboratory for scent in the broadest sense. In addition to perfumes, Bloem develops fragrances for Artis Zoo (including elephant fragrances), collaborates with artists, and creates scent projects for museums. He has an ongoing collaboration with the Embassy of the North Sea on various projects. One of these was a collection of 40 scents from and around the North Sea. Other projects with the Embassy of the North Sea include the installation Bulk in Ruigoord and the installation Decomposition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen's Depot. In 2021, he designed the perfume Zeelucht for the Embassy. Bloem works on his own scent installations and collaborates with artists who want to incorporate scent into their work. He gives scent workshops at the art institution Mediamatic, where he manages the Aroma Lab. In November 2022, his book GEUR, de vergeten zintuig (Scent, the Forgotten Sensation) was published by Ten Have, taking readers on a journey of discovery into the world of fragrance. Written in a light-hearted style, it offers insight into how smell shapes our daily lives and has marked pivotal moments in world history. In 2026, his book Voelen, Ruiken, Proeven (Feel, Smell, Taste) was released. Frank has taught at various art academies and is also involved with Odeuropa and Neuswijzer, both projects of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the Artist

The Zengwen River, locally known as the "blind snake," flows 138 kilometers from the slopes of Dongshui Mountain to the Taiwan Strait. Along its journey, the river passes through areas inhabited by Indigenous peoples, Han Chinese, and—in the past—the Japanese and the Dutch. As it travels, the "blind snake" winds its way through a landscape of diverse scents and customs; being blind, it relies entirely on its sense of smell. Scent is the sense most inextricably linked to memory: as infants, we learn to recognize the world through smell, and later in life, it is often scent that triggers the recollection of memories long thought forgotten. In this work, we follow the olfactory memory of the snake itself. The river becomes the smelling entity, and the arrangement of scents throughout the exhibition traces what the snake has smelled from source to mouth—and across the passage of time. One can detect the scent of the "red-haired barbarians" (the Dutch), the island's first colonizers when it was still known as Formosa, alongside traces left by later occupations. In the spring of 2026, scent artist Frank Bloem traced the river's course and collected an array of scents along the way. He developed and recreated them in his studio at the Tsung-Yeh Arts and Cultural Center—at times letting his imagination run wild, and at other times using the actual materials themselves to compose this installation. The work presents the river's own olfactory memory through a series of bottles mounted on stands, accompanied by handwritten texts created by the artist himself.