My Mobile Clam Shack: Southern Deployment Trial

In the museum's photograph of the room, a Vespa stands at front right, towing a trailer with a lit aquarium. Silver ducts loop across the dark floor between white foam boxes and wheeled carts. Farther back, a clam form sits in a pool of purple light.

This is Lin Yu-Sheng's My Mobile Clam Shack: Southern Deployment Trial, in B1 KSpace at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts until October 18.

Lin built the clam shack from machines most people in Taiwan have used. His guide to the show describes a blue Vespa towing an aquarium and wind ducts linking the equipment. A claw machine has become a clam picker (採蛤抓取設備). A coin pusher washes and sorts clams (洗選蛤設備). There is also a rotating platform. The machines still do what they were made to do, and they still show their wear.

Lin suggests walking up close, going around each piece and listening to the wind and the mechanisms before trying to decode the symbols. The automatic clam work in the room is called 《蛤～你要去哪裡》. 蛤 is the word for clam, and in speech it is also a puzzled "huh?" The title roughly means "Huh? Where are you going?"

The project starts from a memory of Lin's father bending down to gather wild clams. The coast in that memory has since changed, with aquaculture ponds and wind-energy infrastructure, and Lin himself has moved between cities. The shack is built to travel.

It travelled here from the Dahan River. In 2025, outside Banqiao 435 Art Zone, it included an interactive wind-powered clam cultivation pool and video. Two photographs from that version are with this story: Lin in green waders holding an enlarged clam form, and the clam under violet light. The organizer of that iteration identifies Lin as a disabled artist and describes bodily limitation as part of his method.