Legendary Boat Flags of Neiwei - Recreating 100 Illustrations of Ancient Neiwei Aquatic Ecology

Using 300-year-old boat flags
to connect the port, rivers, and Neiwei ponds
to summon vanished hydrology and ecology
Through community participation
recreate a century-old biological illustration and fantasy garden

Fishing flags as summons: from praying for fish to praying for life
Neiwei, from scattered boat shadows three hundred years ago to today's urban green spaces, was once fertile farmland woven with water networks. This waterway started from the port, followed the river deep into the Neiwei ponds, nurturing a rich aquatic civilization. The ponds and canals of the Qing Dynasty era and the mountain springs of the Japanese colonial period constructed habitats for native flora and fauna including crucian carp, perch eel, yellow-flowered water dragon, and Marsilea quadrifolia. However, with industrial expansion and urban development, these shimmering waters gradually disappeared, becoming fragmented landscape memories.

This project is jointly initiated by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and the Neiwei Arts Center, inviting Shih-ti Design to execute it. Using the century-old cultures of "boat flags" and "fishing flags" as mediums, it translates the original "praying for fish" meaning belonging to the ocean into "praying for life" for the land. Traditional boat flags are talismans for ships setting sail, carrying hopes for safety and abundance. Team artist Li Yi-chih (李怡志) observed the social functions and meanings of "gifting," "exchange," "religion," and "maritime affairs" in traditional flag imagery, attempting to fill the missing ecological map in the cracks of history, re-stitching the vanished aquatic portraits and rural stories of Neiwei into the visual aesthetics of large fishing flags.

Co-building a hundred forms of ecological illustrations
This is a collective practice co-written by artists leading flag makers, cultural lecturers, and community partners. It invites teachers and students from schools around the arts center to enter the Neiwei community for field investigations, transforming historical documents and species memories from elders' stories into concrete stencil creations. Participants use traditional paste-dyeing materials such as lime, glutinous rice, and rice bran to personally apply paste and color.

Through workshops, this project constructs an illustrated guide of 127 pieces of ancient Neiwei aquatic ecology. These hundred flags are not just a reproduction of craftsmanship, but a collage of collective experience. When these vanished scales, shells, and aquatic plants reappear on the flags, we are not only repairing a lost chapter of aquatic history but also, in the contemporary city, encircling Neiwei with an aesthetic of pond ecology that intertwines the virtual and the real, awakening a deep humanistic resonance with the land.