Artwork Appreciation
LIN Tay-Jou is a movie director whose works go beyond documentary, experimental, and theatrical genres and often incorporate video artworks into environmental issues. Unexploded Bomb reveals the serious threats posed by the petrochemical industry on the living environment. The film starts with the sounds of explosions of the Tianjin explosion in August 2015. An upside down aerial video footage then records the lands of southern Taiwan and how it is surrounded by the petrochemical industry. Overly-developed industrial zones provide a superficial sense of advanced development and happiness. However, the cold factory buildings and neat formations of storage tanks and pipelines are, in fact, as fragile as bricks piled atop each other. LIN Tay-Jou converted these industrial zones into terrible, twisted landscapes, ripping apart the energetic and vital appearance of cracking plants into cold, isolated, symbolic icons. The phallic chimneys stretching far into the skies are reverted to become signs of flaccid impotence. The work serves as a critique against environmental encroachment by industrial development.