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The insect series drawings all share a theme with urban expansion that came from my experiences hiking around the forests near Taipei and in the rest of Taiwan. When I walked around Taipei, I noticed that the city was encroaching further and further into the forest and the farmland. Even areas that look like pristine forest turn out to be riddled with betel nut plantations as you got closer to them. I remember, back in 2015, I was quite saddened to see Taipei losing a huge area of farmland and a bit of wetland in Xindian. It was one of the last few large agricultural spaces in the Taipei Basin. Just looking at satellite imagery of the areas around the cities and of the mountain foothills over the past 20 years is pretty sobering.

So I started to think about making something to represent this process. I eventually settled on insects because when it comes to habitat loss, most people focus on the larger animals such as bears. People don’t really focus on the insects even though they are equally important parts of the ecosystem. I also noticed that a lot of insects have very delicate wing patterns. I thought it would be an interesting combination of macro and micro things to create the street plans of the cities along the patterns on the insect wings.

Some of the drawings have other themes within them. For example Spider and Dragonfly is a representation of air pollution issues. The spider itself is a heavily polluting naphtha cracker plant with an ordinary Taiwanese town (based on Mailiao) in its web. The colors are based on the reds and purples that air pollution apps display on bad days. Mantis and Grasshopper represents old and new Hong Kong and was drawn at the time of the umbrella movement.

The problems this series deals with are not exclusive to Taiwan, so I’ve used a lot of world cities as inspiration. There’s one based on Buenos Aires, another that takes parts of Manchester and Nottingham, and there are a few American ones. Some others are imagined completely. I want people at first glance to feel as though these are Utopian cities and good places to live. But then to really think about it, and to perhaps realize living in these cities would be a nightmare. There is hardly any open space and many buildings are tall enough to block out all light on the streets. I often put a few informal settlements on them too, usually underneath the wings, because I imagine cities like these will have a lot of economic problems. In my mind, the insects are semi-alive but the cities are in charge of them; There is a host-and-parasite relationship there. I am not anti-development, nor do I think there should be no more buildings ever. This series is an expression of my feelings that cities should be planned and built in more considered ways. Taipei has recently gotten better at using the areas of brownfield land it has but most of the other cities here seem to view natural and edgeland areas as something to be concreted over, despite a constantly declining population.

In future I will make a page for each of these but for now please check out the images. If you’re interested in purchasing any I have a couple of prints and the Hornets original available through the shops linked in the navigation