Aquarium designer and award-winning shrimp breeder Wang Chun-yi’s (王君懿) creations are being exhibited at the aquaculture section of the Taoyuan Agriculture Expo, which opened on Saturday.
Wang, 31, said he studied art in college, but experienced debilitating panic attacks whenever he hit a creative block and only found solace in designing aquariums.
“When I suffer an attack, I cannot breathe and it feels like a bolt of lightning has struck my chest,” he said on Thursday. “Nothing I tried helped until a friend introduced me to aquascaping, which eventually became what I do for a living.”
Photo: Hsu Chen-hsun, Taipei Times
After serving his mandatory military service, he opened a studio specializing in ornamental seaweed and bee shrimps, Wang said.
Winning the grand prize in the red-and-white bee shrimps category at the 2014 Aquarama International Fish Competition brought him fame.
“Bee shrimps live only in waters kept at 25 degrees Celsius and a low acidity, and they need precise doses of supplements of vitamins, rare elements and minerals to thrive,” he said. “You have to check them constantly for activity or they will not be healthy or look good.”
Photo: Hsu Chen-hsun, Taipei Times
“Keeping seaweed is more or less the same deal: meticulousness is key,” he said.
In April, the Taoyuan City Government hired him as an adviser for young people starting their own businesses, and in June he signed a memorandum of understanding to provide aquascaping services for the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia.
“An aquarium can be a microcosm of the universe or a projection of the creator’s personality,” he said. “Technically, an aquarium needs only to sustain the living things it contains to be functional; the flourishes and aesthetics are entirely personal to the designer.”
For example, one piece he created for the Taoyuan exhibition is a cube aquarium containing a volcanic rock and black clownfish, which evokes the style and colors of ink-brush paintings, he said.
One of his goals is to create therapeutic aquariums to calm the nerves of patients and their loved ones at hospitals and medical facilities in Taiwan, he said.
The month-long Taoyuan Agriculture Expo, near the Sinwu Weather Station in Sinwu District (新屋), is open from 9am to 5pm.
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