Showing their talents, earning a living
The main members of Sandwishes are Xie Ruolin, 29; Li Wankeng, 30; and Ceng Yunjie, 35.
Two years ago, Li and Ceng were students in an interdisciplinary graduate program at Taipei National University of Arts (TNUA) and they took a class on multidisciplinary art projects. The instructor, Professor Chen Kai-huang, brought them to the Happy Mount Home to explore the possibilities of connections between the arts and special education.
For the entire semester, the students actively participated in activities at the home. At the end of the term, they transformed what they had learned into creative work.
Working with the home’s music therapy teacher to grasp the key concepts of “breaking apart” and “transforming,” Li created a work of installation art entitled Happy Mount’s Mobile Team. It demonstrates how disabled people, in learning basic life skills such as brushing their teeth, getting out of bed, drinking and eating, need to have their teachers break down processes into very small steps if they are to learn them. For instance, the process of drinking from a glass of water is broken down into grasping the glass, raising it, bringing it to the lips and actually drinking.
Ceng had a realization about the key words of “connections” and “communication,” which she displayed in the performance art piece Happy Mount Drink. She took herbs gathered on the expansive grounds of the home and made a drink out of them, inviting members of the audience, who came from the world outside, to consume it. She thus established connections between the general public and the home, which is usually at a remove from the outside world.
Happy with their experiences at Happy Mount, Li and Ceng stayed connected to the home as volunteers after the class ended, and they even invited other students from their program, including Xie, to join them. Angela Yao, Happy Mount’s director, was delighted and provided a design fee for the students to create a large defining signpost-like installation for the home, as well as promotional postcards and wrapping paper.
The three volunteers applied what they had learned at art school, breaking down the paintings by the disabled children in the home to serve as small graphic elements, and then building them up again into various designs. Their work garnered much praise. The large giraffe signpost in particular won the admiration of the home’s children. It started a craze among them for drawing giraffes.
“Able both to show our talents and earn some income, we very much enjoyed the experience!” Xie says that the three of them began to wonder if they could establish a creative studio that specialized in designing products, holding exhibitions and creating promotional materials for organizations that served the disabled, with a focus on integrating Ceng’s words “connections” and “communication” into their products.
Taking “connections” and “communications” as its key words, Ceng Yunjie’s work Happy Mount Drink emphasizes the therapeutic nature of art.