If the Zengwen River had a nose

At the 2026 Mattauw Earth Triennial, Chen Ke-ting stores the scents of plants while Frank Bloem wonders what the river has been smelling all this time.

A row of glass bottles lies sideways on black stands, mouths facing the room. Quite a turnout for a press conference. Here, in a timber-floored gallery in Tsung-Yeh Arts and Cultural Center's Red Building, the star is the Zengwen River. Dutch artist Frank Bloem's Scent Memories of the Blind Snake hands the job of remembering its journey—from source to sea—to a nose.

The river has a wonderfully vigorous local nickname: 青瞑蛇, the blind snake. Bloem collected scent materials along its course this spring, then worked on them during his residency at Tsung-Yeh. Some scents come from materials he gathered; others are imagined reconstructions. They enter the gallery alongside handwritten texts.

Usually we get to look at a landscape and tell everyone about it. This time the landscape remembers us. Even the apparently empty space inside a bottle deserves a closer look. A photograph can give you the mouth and the stand. Your nose gets the next scene.

Also in the Red Building is Chen Ke-ting's Harvesting the Flowing Memories of Zeng-wen River. Chen starts with plants collected around the river, extracting them into tinctures and hydrosols. They hold environmental scents while drawing on residents' memories and imagination. With a master's degree in plant pathology from National Chung Hsing University, Chen connects botanical collecting with ecological observation and local stories.

Look at the installation photograph: glass jars hang above wooden tables loaded with dried leaves, branches and seed-bearing stems. Some jars hold pale liquids, others darker material; slender test tubes reach below the tables. The plants remain visible beside the vessels that preserve and transform them. Let your eyes follow all that first, then hand over to your sense of smell. There is pleasure in the changeover itself.

The 2026 Mattauw Earth Triennial follows the Zengwen River basin through December 6. You can begin with this one red-brick building in Madou. It used to be the sugar company's office. After the factory closed in 1993, local people campaigned to preserve the old buildings, helping to keep a place we can still walk into and take our time with.

Visiting

Tsung-Yeh Arts and Cultural Center, Red Building, 5 Zongye, Nanshi Village, Madou District, Tainan. September 5–December 6, 2026; Wednesday–Sunday 09:00–17:00, closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Free admission.

Take a Taiwan Railways train to Longtian, then the Orange 10 bus toward Madou. Get off at Zongye Sugar Factory and walk roughly 300 metres, about five minutes, into the centre. The works are TY9 and TY10 on the exhibition map, both in the Red Building.