Two Poles, One Conversation: An Artist Talk with Jia-Jen Lin & Marisa DelaNieves Delgado

The Taiwanese American Arts Council invites you to a rare and resonant Artist Talk featuring Jia-Jen Lin and Marisa DelasNieves Delgado, two artists whose practices stretch across the poles—Arctic and Antarctic—to explore how you belong to a world that is constantly shifting. As part of the 2025 Eco Art on Island exhibition, these artists bring powerful, place-based perspectives on identity, climate, memory, and legacy.

Jia-Jen Lin, born in Taiwan and trained in classical techniques, turned toward conceptual installations and interdisciplinary media to examine the body, identity, and ecological entanglement. Her work, Collapsing Landscape: No One Surface the Same as Any Other, was filmed during an expedition around the Svalbard archipelago, and reveals the haunting instability of a melting Arctic. As the only planar video work in the exhibition, the piece stands out through its “absent-protagonist” narrative—no people appear on screen, yet the traces of human behavior are felt throughout. Reflecting years of research and collaboration, including with poet Laurie Glover, the work meditates on loss, silence, and the impermanence of both landscape and self.

Marisa DelasNieves Delgado, the first woman born in Antarctica, offers a deeply personal counterpoint. Her photographs document her Argentine family’s time living on the southernmost continent in the 1970s, exploring themes of nationality, identity, kinship, and the psychological concept of home. The photographs focus on the quiet tension between historical presence and political absence, reflecting on how borders, belonging, and inherited memory take shape in an environment often perceived as empty or unclaimed.

Together, Lin and Delgado’s conversation brings: What does it mean to inhabit a landscape—visibly or invisibly? How do you write yourselves into places that are melting, drifting, or forgotten? In dialogue, the artists will explore the intersection of personal origin and planetary change, of diaspora and displacement, of environmental degradation and cultural continuity.

Expect an exchange that moves beyond medium—video and photography—into lived experience, shared vulnerability, and artistic responsibility. The talk may touch on topics such as the ethics of representing land and legacy, how grief and climate anxiety inform creative processes, and how personal history becomes material in ecological art practices.

Join for this rare Artist Talk that brings together two hemispheres, two artists, and one urgent question: How do you tell stories of a disappearing world?

Transportation Note:
Visitors can take the Governors Island ferry from the Battery Maritime Building at 10 South Street, Manhattan. Be sure to check the ferry schedule in advance, as service times vary by day.

For more information, contact:

Luchia Meihua Lee,
Executive Director/Chief Curator, TAAC
Luchia.lee@taac-us.org
+1 917 412 2831

Cheng Chen Stanley Cheng,
Intern, TAAC
stanleycheng0727@gmail.com
+1 347 969 2650