YEAR on year, the impacts of climate change are hard to see: air temperatures warming by a few tenths of a degree here, sea levels rising by a few millimetres there.
This poses a challenge to the artists who tackle climate change — a challenge that Taiwan’s Vincent J.F. Huang addresses by steamrolling right over it.
In “Destiny Intertwined,” an exhibition running at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Mr Huang takes eco-art to blunt, cartoonish extremes — the better to communicate, he says, the stark moral threat climate change presents.
At the show’s entrance, he invites visitors to squeeze a gasoline pump that triggers the decapitation of a sea turtle by a giant oil rig. The guillotine’s counterweight: a trussed-up Wall Street bull sculpture, representing capitalism.
Further inside, an abject Statue of Liberty pleads for forgiveness from penguins dressed as the terracotta warriors of Xi’an.
“It’s a metaphor for the American government,” Mr Huang says of Lady Liberty, while the penguins stand for “an animal sacrificed by the human impact of climate change, soldiers and the army…sacrificed for the Emperor in Chinese history.”