Taiwan was a major cotton producer during the Japanese colonial period. In 1941, the Japanese 10-year program encouraged large scale cotton production; however, after joining the World Trade Organization (W.T.O.), local cotton could not withstand the low price of imported cotton, quickly destroying Taiwan’s cotton industry. The recognition of Taiwan's landscape is a collective presentation. Colonization is put into the process of nation-building, which includes the definition of native species. As a former industry-dominant country to a contemporary dedicated organic cotton farm, the Taiwanese recall their local memory through cotton planting by connecting the past, reimagining the future, and uncovering self-identity.

In the United States, cotton cultivation in the South to Mexico changed the geopolitics of the country. The cultivation of cotton had a profound impact on humanity and history - cotton fueled westward expansion and entrenched the economic role of slavery, deepening the divide between the free North and the slaveholding South, ultimately triggering the American Civil War. Industrial movement took off due to cotton production in New England and exports abroad. The significance of U.S. environmental history is that it echoes political history and ecological ethics, which is a response to consumerist economics.

While the United States started from a nationally constructed historical perspective and then transformed itself into an environmental history, Taiwan has shown the opposite path by first using environmental history to respond to the environmental movement and then stimulating environmental politics to react further to the localization movement. The question arises: What is the ecological relationship between Taiwan and the U.S.A., as well as the cultural definitions of the author, with the change in ideology and perception of the environment due to the impact of cotton material?

This project aims to probe the potential of national identity through the Javanica tree, which represents Taiwan, where the author spent her childhood and the Palm tree, which depicts California in the United States, where the author spent the majority of her life. The Javanica is a native species of Taiwan, symbolizing the author's self-identity while the Palm tree is an exotic species that creates an impression of sunny California, symbolizing the author’s arrival to this new location. The exhibition echoes the author's ambiguousness of cultural identity of the self.