Wang Yu-Song

王煜松 

Following the 2024 Hualien earthquake, the local stone industry was profoundly affected. Large quantities of broken stone were gathered and piled into newly formed sites created in the aftermath of the disaster. Living in Hualien, we often see trucks transporting stone along the roads, yet rarely do we fully understand the relationships between these stones, the land, the people, and the industry. Climbing a Stone Mountain continues the Earthquake Sketching Group's practice of entering sites through the body. This time, we visited stone waste yards and stone-processing factories to sketch on site.

At the stone waste yard, the discarded stones originated from different countries and quarries. After being extracted, transported, and processed, they were shattered by the earthquake and accumulated together, forming mountain-like piles of stone. Among them, the green serpentinite came from the mountains of Hualien. As we approached these stones, we began to imagine where they had originally belonged and the journeys they had undergone. Walking and climbing among the piles, we attempted to identify their textures and origins, recording our observations through drawing.

During this process, we discovered that what initially appeared to be an abandoned industrial site had already become a new ecosystem. Mosquitofish swam in pools of water between the stone piles, birds arrived to feed, and frog tracks appeared across the muddy ground. Life continued to emerge within this landscape, shaped jointly by the earthquake and the stone industry.

We later entered a stone-processing factory, where we used serpentinite slabs as painting surfaces to depict the landscapes we had encountered in the stone waste yard. Adopting the marking methods commonly used in stone production, we drew directly onto the stone with