Over a meal of briny urchin, fried fish, and sea snails he’d caught that afternoon, washed down with cold beer, Brother Chen told me: 獨立生活，獨立思考，獨立創作—independent living, independent thinking, independent creating. This is the Matsu way.

Unlike the military slogans covering the islands, he offered it not as a battle cry, but simply as a way people had learned to live here. I heard versions of it across Matsu, as uncles took me to dig for dinner on the beach and aunties showed me how to work with native plants.

Matsu is more often described as a frontline than as a place where people live. Cast as “Taiwan’s outlying islands” or a buffer against China, it appears in news reports as a military outpost, in tourism brochures as a remote curiosity. These frames leave little room for the costs people have borne here—or for the rhythms that keep life going.

For decades, Matsu was a closed military zone. Residents lived under surveillance and needed permits to travel to Taiwan’s main island. From 1958 to 1979, the islands were shelled on alternating days: 單打雙不打—on odd-numbered days, bombardment; on even days, repair, recovery, preparation for the next round.

This history is often told as sacrifice. Up close, it is grief, improvisation, and endurance. One elder told me that after her grandmother’s death, soldiers forced her family to extinguish candles mid-ritual to enforce blackout rules. Half a century later, she still carries the guilt of not guiding her grandmother’s spirit home.

Before I arrived, I was warned that Matsu was Deep Blue and that the locals 排外—that they did not easily trust outsiders. I remember thinking, maybe I’d be wary too, if my home had been used as a frontline for someone else’s war, then forgotten in peacetime. But on these islands, long isolated and instrumentalized, allegiance to the KMT and community cohesion were not choices but conditions for survival. The binaries we now wield—Blue vs Green, unification vs independence, China vs Taiwan—flatten lives shaped by far more complicated realities.

Young people spoke of wanting to understand what had happened here, while many elders said the past was too painful to revisit—better to just look forward. But, the youth asked, how do we map our future without knowing our past?

The work began with gatherings across islands and generations. In Nangan, Beigan, Dongyin, and Juguang, residents aged 1 to 80 came together to sit with two questions: What has shaped the spirit of Matsu? How can it be carried forward?

People spoke of endurance and of pride. Of being flowers that grow from rock. Of a love of these waters and a commitment to these lands. Of a future with agency. They inscribed their responses onto chess pieces: on one side, what defined Matsu’s spirit; on the other, a wish for its future. In a place long saturated with slogans from above, it was not easy to find one’s own words. But in circles, they shared their reflections aloud and saw pieces of themselves in each other. One auntie in her sixties told me, “Even though we’ve been neighbours our entire lives, we’ve never talked like this.”

Each finished piece was filled with plant life gathered from the islands, a form shaped by elsewhere now holding what grows here.

After the exhibition, residents took their vessels home, each holding a piece of Matsu’s past and a proposition for its future. Now scattered across living rooms and storefronts, they continue to spark conversations about what has been lived here and what is still unfolding.