It may be hard to believe that the place where a giant picture of Pablo Picasso’s work Dream, composed of more than 50,000 pots of flowers, has been erected is in Wulaokeng (武荖坑), which suffered the brunt of mudslides triggered by Typhoon Parma last October.
Wulaokeng, located in Yilan County’s Dongshan Township (冬山), has been the venue for the annual Yilan Green Expo since 2001.
After Parma, many people thought that this year’s expo would have to be moved.
But Yilan County Commissioner Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢) said yesterday that the exhibition would be held at the same location, but with an arrangement to make people rethink their relationship with nature.
“Instead of clearing the mudslides, we decided to leave them, and use pots of flowers to produce a large version of Picasso’s Dream,” Lin said at an event in Taipei to announce the Green Expo. “If you walk into the ‘picture,’ you will discover it is actually a labyrinth of flowers.”
Constructing the labyrinth on mudslide-covered ground was a way to inspire people to think about how human beings should interact with nature and face the challenges posed by global climate change as well as the devastating natural disasters related to climate change, he said.
“Although the mudslides caused damage, instead of trying to arbitrarily reverse the damage, we left it as it was. We believe nature has it own way of repairing the damage,” Lin said.
The Green Expo will also include an exhibition of medical herbs, a forest trekking route, an area with real-life presentation of Yilan’s recreational agriculture, a kangaroo farm and a performance hall.
The expo opens on Saturday and will run through May 7. It will be open from 9am to 6pm.
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