500 Lemon Trees: Patient Number 7

In 2013, 500 Lemon Trees took the form of an exhibition and functioned as a crowdfunding platform. On the one hand, by using resources from the art world, I developed agricultural brands, activated abandoned lands, grew lemon trees and further brewed lemon liquor. On the other hand, the project connected family members, local farmers and consumers into the narrative of the work, creating new community relations which became an indispensable part of the evolution process. Through such action and practice, I started to observe life and became interested in the ordinary individuals involved in the project. Thus I established an intertwining, reciprocal and symbiotic system made up of “planting, researching, writing, brewing and bartending”. It’s a brand, art, liquor, and, furthermore, a flexible and adaptable organism.

Patient Number 7 is alcohol, words, liquor recipes, collecting, roots of Taiwan acacia; it is a battle between consciousness and unconsciousness about medicine and disease. With Patient number 7’s illusion and along his path of collecting, I took plants from edges of farms as ingredients for liquor. Unease and uncertainties are like smells that we can taste from the liquor. This implies how to grasp questions about an individual’s life situation, and complicated contexts among liquor, disease, medicine and hallucination provocation that remain unknown to me. Of course, there are also many misunderstandings that remain to be unraveled. Yet I found that misreading and misinterpretation seem to be a necessary and ultimate process since it involves important information for reconceiving one’s situation of existence and maintaining relations.