The geographic backdrop of the “East Coast Land Arts Festival” is the long and narrow land mass situated between the coastal mountain range and the Pacific Ocean, 168 kilometers in length, extending southward out of Hualien City to Taitung City; home to the site of Paleolithic Changbin Culture (5,000 to 50,000 years ago) that presented the earliest evidence of human activity on the island of Taiwan.
Thousands of years have passed, ten indigenous groups found their home here, as well as the Han Chinese and a significant number of new immigrants from around the world have also settled here with the total population reaching just over 50,000. So many ethnic groups are scattered around such a long and narrow space, where the mountains meet the ocean, with its extending, diversified and fluid character giving birth to unique symbiotic relationships, both inter-personally and between people and nature. The intertidal zone, the exposed coastal area that belongs to both the land and the ocean, where different realities overlap, is home to a rich ecological diversity and an abundant marine life culture – a food bank from which the local Amis people are nourished daily.
