Harry Yi-Jui Wu (HW): Can you tell readers of EASTS what your background is?
What did you do before becoming an artist?
Tom Rook (TR): I studied Geography at the University of Nottingham, where I learned a variety of subjects such as glaciation, climate science, and colonialism. I have always been interested in observing cities. I'm from a small town in the countryside so I'm drawn to how much and how quickly cities change. During university I focused a little more on urban change. Initially I was going to become an urban planner, and I still considered that career long after I moved to Taiwan.
Before and during university I traveled a bit and worked for a time in India. I wanted to continue this after graduation so I took a teaching course with the aim of finding work overseas. I heard about Taiwan from a couple of people and it seemed a good fit. After graduation I flew there with the intention of staying a year and then returning for an urban planning masters. Of course this didn't happen and I found a career I loved here instead.
HW: What do you normally do to find inspiration and elements for your creative works?
TR: This is a tricky question because I don't have a set process. I don't set out on a particular day and think "today I'm going to observe the city and make something creative from that". I don't do anything like that. I go and observe my surroundings very closely because I'm genuinely quite interested and curious about them. Ideas might develop from that, but they may knock around my head for months before they form into something I think is interesting enough to run with.
With the historic maps for example, I was finding it eye-opening to see images of Taipei in the 1920s and 1930s. It changed so much! It was so different from my hometown or somewhere like Oxford perhaps, where if you see an old painting a lot of the city still looks like it did then. I started to research a little more and then decided I would try to present all this imagery in a new way. I settled on re-creating the city in the 1930s. When I decide to run with an idea I am very determined with the research process; often finding hundreds of sources and making detailed surveys and
