Ghosts in the Foreign Land is a research project, initiated by artist Lin Szu-Han at the end of 2023, investigating the Bîng KunToh (Underworld-Army Table), a ritual held during Ghost Month to honor foreign spirits in Penghu, Taiwan. This practice can be traced back to the 17th century’s Age of Discovery, when East and Southeast Asia became hotspots of conflict, leaving many soldiers to perish and wander as spirits foreign lands.
Starting at the old ruins “Snakehead Hill” in Penghu, the research includes a series of interviews with local historians, sociologists, villagers, and the master of ceremonies for the 2024 Bîng KunToh ritual. Beyond preserving these increasingly simplified ceremonies through film documentation before they disappear, the project has established a two-phase collaboration between contemporary creators from Taiwan and the Netherlands. This cross-disciplinary initiative aims not only to document this vanishing tradition but also to explore its broader contemporary and cultural implications.
Events Overview
- Exhibition on view from November 17th until December 14th
- Opening Day with Performances and Artist Talks November 17th 12:00-17:00
- Dining Experience November 24th (more information coming soon)
- Panel Discussion and Finissage 14th December (more information coming soon)
Participating Artists
Group A: Lin Szu-Han (TW), Wessel Verrijt (NL)
Lin Szu-Han is a visual artist and social designer whose practice is rooted in her father’s work as a mortician. This background has shaped her exploration of social beliefs, death rituals, metaphysics, and spectral narratives within specific landscapes. Lin works across video, performance, sculpture and installation, transforming social issues into visual narratives using everyday objects and accessible artistic techniques. Marginalised and non-human perspectives lie at the core of her work, offering new outlooks on epistemological and socio-environmental crises. Lin’s long-term practice centres on spatial narratives and bodily experiences, exploring emotional attachments to land and identity through spatial representations and religious symbols.
Breath In The Ghost 把鬼呼吸進來
Upon arriving in Penghu for her field research, Lin Szu-Han immediately fell ill. Local elders attributed her sickness to negative energy that had invaded her body through encounters with 'unclean things'. Beneath her skin, her body became a vessel offering, what may have been a Dutch ghost, a physical form once more and granting it the power to tell its story. She sought to express the fictitious nature of deity-making through exaggeration, outlining the Dutch ghost's spinal structure as it appeared in her own consciousness.
Building on this concept, Lin created a 5-minute video, filmed on the abandoned peninsula where the ruins of the Dutch fortress stand. In this ‘physical space’, she engages in dialogue with the Dutch ghost. The spinal structure is carved from the wood of a White Popinac (Leucaena leucocephala), a tree species reportedly brought to Penghu by the Dutch in the 17th century. Over four centuries it has transformed—from essential firewood to an invasive species—its essence unchanged yet recontextualised through time and space.
Wessel Verrijt creates sculptural objects that merge body and matter, blurring the boundary between the living and the non-living. Through performance, these sculptures come to life, transforming into ‘hybrid entities’ as the performers concealed within the seemingly inanimate structures are revealed to the audience, embodying a delicate balance between stillness and movement. The sculptures evolve continuously as their materials are reused and transformed into new works, resembling the evolutionary cycle of a living organism. Inspired by folklore, rituals, and ecology, Verrijt draws parallels between natural cycles and mythical archetypes. Through live performances and sculptural installations, these cycles and ancient beliefs resonate within his evolving sculptures, which are perpetually disassembled and reborn. This process mirrors the cycles of decay and renewal found in nature, gradually forming a unique mythology of their own.
For this project, Wessel was particularly inspired by a performance film Szu-Han Lin created during her stay in Penghu called Dancing with White Popinac, in which a dancer interacts with rolling waves and grass swayed by the wind; her movements fluid as if part of the surrounding landscape. From this, Verrijt crafted a new sculpture that resonates with and responds to Szu-Han's process. The sculpture Verrijt created is a constantly moving, evolving piece, containing textiles and kinetic elements that ripple and echo with every new movement. An initial impulse triggers a rhythmic, organic flow which is perpetuated by the sculpture itself with no extra effort. This reflects the Taoist principle of Wu Wei—which translates to ‘non-doing’ or ‘effortless action’—where a single motion creates a continuous, harmonious resonance.
Group B: Lin Wen-Hsuan (TW), Jonat Deelstra (NL)
The core themes of Lin Wen-Hsuan’s work are memory and psychological space, transforming past negative experiences into symbolic gifts as a way to let them go. Growing up in the countryside, Lin struggled with the fast pace of modern life, which led her to adopt a slower artistic process—through rituals, this extended creative journey becomes a nurturing experience that helps her release past troubles. In recent works, she has begun observing how objects change within psychological space, focusing on the viewer’s experience and interaction with the space itself. Lin Wen-Hsuan's early ceramic works treat clay as a material shaped by geography, history, culture, space, and time, carrying unique meanings in people's minds.
The Table of the Underworld 幽冥餐桌
In Penghu Lin became intrigued by local Taoist beliefs about the underworld and the realm of souls. The Ghost Table reflects Taiwan's cultural attitudes toward external influences: Lin believes that Fenggui residents use rituals to accept and embrace the spirits of foreign soldiers—spirits that once inspired fear but now linger without a home in the afterlife. Lin envisions the ghosts of Dutch soldiers as ancestors, considering how to provide them a taste of home. Observing traditional offerings that symbolise the local idea of Western food she questioned whether the Dutch souls could find their path to peace or reincarnation through such stereotypes. Drawing from her time in the Netherlands, she created ritual offerings that reflect Dutch cuisine, incorporating foods like pancakes, cheese, tea, and sausages. However, the surfaces of these offerings are marked by cracks, as if weathered over time, symbolizing cultural conflict.
The time and space of the underworld is depicted by black and white ceramic fragments. Lin uses Taiwanese white clay and Dutch black soil The black and white colors symbolize cultural extremes. However, when Lin combined these two soils with different thermal properties, they created a new pattern on the ceramic pieces, suggesting that cultural conflicts may lead to surprising outcomes beyond expectations.
The paintings, graphic work, and installations of Jonat Deelstra are both narrative and alienating, often described as magical realism. His work explores humanity’s attempts to settle on planet Earth, as well as how people interact with each other and their environment. His bright, inviting, and accessible imagery conceals an unspoken tension—as if something terrible were about to happen.
Crevice & And therefore
Upon viewing the work of his partner artist Lin Wen-Hsuan, Deelstra created a pair of contrasting pieces in response. While Wen-Hsuan’s work employs two materials that contrast in color and material, yet they still hold together and mix, Deelstra’s rely on each other. The two complementary paintings explore distinct aspects of Ghost Month: one presents a rational, earthly, and pragmatic view, while the other embodies a dreamy, spiritual, and more abstract nature. The first painting depicts a deserted table filled with symbolic offerings, while the second features bubbling, liquid forms that reference the hungry ghosts' attraction to water. The works’ fleeting, painterly strokes evoke a sense of transience.
Group C: Chiang Ping-Fan & Chuang Hsiang-Ching (TW), Stef Veldhuis (NL)
CHIANG PING-FAN & CHUANG HSIANG-CHING
Cookie (Chiang Ping-Fan) and Chester (Chuang Hsiang-Ching) are a design duo whose collaborative project, Departing Shore, embodies their shared vision of reimagining colonial history across geographical, spatial, and religious lenses. Their long-standing friendship and creative synergy allows them to combine their individual strengths: Cookie, an architect and designer, is recognised for his transdisciplinary approach to urban interventions that challenges conventional interactions with space. Chester, who has a multidisciplinary background in design, research, and art, uses drawing and installation as means to dissect and reimagine human perception and cognition. Together, they create immersive experiences that encourage viewers to question and reinterpret their inherited history.
Departing shore 惜別的海岸
If the lost Dutch souls of Penghu were to return to Rotterdam—Europe's largest deep-water port—would they still be able to find their way home? Over the past four hundred years, changes in the natural environment and man-made projects wiped the former coastline away, the old shipping lanes are unrecognisable, and the nautical charts on which they relied are long out of date.
During their fieldwork in Penghu, they were inspired by the belief in local amulet towers and, by observing the tides, coasts, and waterways, Ping-Fan and Hsiang-Ching uncovered a unique local landscape infused with energy. Here man-made objects are used to balance the changes brought by natural disasters. They gathered local materials imbued with special energy and crafted a rope piece symbolically linking Penghu and Rotterdam, intended to drive away evil and guide wandering souls safely on their journey home.
Stef Veldhuis is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and science, exploring collaborative relationships between human and more-than-human intelligences and phenomena. Through the use of technology, Veldhuis’ work harnesses the creative force of various more-than-human agents, allowing their contingent behaviours to enliven the work throughout its exhibition. A central theme in Veldhuis’s practice is the role of memory, history, and archiving—elements often considered uniquely human. Veldhuis invites other intelligences into these traditionally anthropocentric processes, challenging the static nature of the archive. By incorporating more-than-human perspectives into the creation and storage of memory, energy, and objects, his work introduces dynamic elements into systems typically associated with preservation and control.
Transference
Transference refers to the movement of energy or particles from one medium to another. Radio waves, as electromagnetic energy, perform this act by moving through air and permeating spaces, thus imbuing the space with fragments of place, memory, and experience. Stef Veldhuis draws a parallel between the metaphysical nature of ghosts and the ‘absent presence’ of radio — an intangible thing that penetrates walls and tissue. While studying the field notes from his partner artist Chiang Ping-Fan, Veldhuis found mention of similar antennae on the island of Penghu—small concrete temples commemorating military generals that mark the centers and boundaries of each village. Conduits to the spirit realm, these structures allow the long-gone generals to roam among the living as protectors of the town: a supernatural zone.
In Transference, the sculpture functions as an extreme narrowcasting transmitter that creates an electromagnetic zone with a radius of approximately 3 meters around the antenna. It transmits recordings made by the artist during a prior three-month residency in Tainan, Taiwan, in 2023; a sonic archive of bells, dogs, electromagnetic waves, and other intangible encounters. Unfamiliar with the language and culture, Veldhuis found it impossible to label sounds as either noise or signal while recording. This resulted in a completely unbiased form of listening, where spoken words, barking dogs, birds, and waves hitting the shore received equal attention.
This project is supported by Stimuleringsfonds and Nieuwe Instituut as part of the Hidden Histories Open Call and by the Netherlands Office Taiwan for 2024: Year of Netherlands Innovation and Culture
