Since the 1950s, due to increase in human travel and trade, animals and plants have crossed into new territories, creating new ecological categories of ‘invasive’ and ‘native’ species. Most conservation efforts are aimed at destroying the former and protecting the latter, though increasingly, more ecologists are conceding that these categories are fluid and unstable. This section explores the instability of these man-made taxonomies, as well as the measures taken to protect the boundaries between the foreign and local, the noxious and useful. 

Exhibits include two seminal publications that first introduced the categories of endemic and introduced species -- Man As An Agent in the Spread of Organisms (1956) and The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (1958). Other highlights are images of the spotted tree frog, an invasive species in Taipei crowding out the native white-lipped frog. These were created when Zhao Renhui joined a group of volunteers in Taipei who meet regularly on night hunts to capture invasive spotted tree frogs. He created mysterious images out of the event (Spotted Tree Frogs (Polypedates megacephalus) collected in a single night, and White-lipped Tree Frog (Polypedates braueri), both 2019). 

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Robert Zhao Renhui: The Lines We Draw