A Budding Approach to Contemporary Art History Arising from Modernological Articles on Contemporary Aboriginal Art
written by Yushih Haipis Lin
“When Slope Culture Meets a Vertical City: Contemporary Art Exhibition from Greater Sandimen” was recently held at Taiwan Indigenous Culture Park from May 18th to September 10th. It was one of the biggest exhibitions on Taiwanese aboriginal contemporary art in the past few years. The pre-exhibition on both the chronicle of events and documentary films, “When Slope Culture Meets a Vertical City: Contemporary Art Document Exhibition from Greater Sandimen” was held in The National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in February to go along with the major exhibition at the Culture Park in Majia Town, Pingtung. It included more than one hundred and seventy pieces of artwork from sixteen artists and included paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos.
The curation for the “Contemporary Art Exhibition from Greater Sandimen” actually included two co-existing contexts. The first emanated from the “Kacalisiyan” art festival, which the co-curator Etan Pavavalung, a Paiwan artist from Tavadran tribe, has been running for three years. For the festival, he combined the name that Paiwan and Rukai people of the greater Sandimen area call themselves, “kacalisiyan” or “the people who really live on the slope”, and the long-term exhibition discourse together with the group art production. This helped the artists and cultural workers achieve a communal sense closer to the subjectivity of the ethnic group and historical context. Consequently, this has also helped this art community take a form, in which the artists’ personal lives and family histories over the past twenty years have become deeply entwined with each other. In return, it has provided the texture for greater Sandimen artistic living and community, instead of becoming irrelevant ashes due to the process of modernization. The second context stemmed from the curator, Manray Hsu’s adoption of sociological thinking of contemporary art, which he excels at. He compares the gigantic aboriginal art anthills of the greater Sandimen area with contemporaneous vertical urban civilization to display the difficult situation that artists, the tribes, the communities, and indeed all aboriginal people encounter.
In the curator’s note, Manray Hsu wrote, “Since the late 19th century, this geological and political protection was dismantled by the invasion of modern colonialism. Modernity brought in various infrastructures, from technologybased roads, bridges, hydraulic engineering, electricity, telecommunication, to churches, schools, hospitals, as well as governmental architecture and institutions. These infrastructures not only transformed indigenous social organization and lifestyle but propelled Kacalisiyan culture into the whirlwind of the modern vertical city and to become an integral part of the planetary urban network. Confronting the challenges of colonial modernity, the Kacalisiyan peoples have resisted, negotiated, been dispossessed, and adapted themselves to modern indigenous, hybrid identities. This process is comprised of historical trauma, politicoeconomical disadvantage, as well as long decolonization, in which microaggression, frustration, and struggle are all at stake.”
We can see from the observation above that these two curators, the Paiwan Etan Pavavalung and the Mandarin Manray Hsu, from their own ethnocultural positions and through their own art experiences, provide this exhibition with two contrasting forces and perspectives, the inward and the outward. Whereas aboriginal art has long been regarded for its inward communal discourse, the dramatic cultural transformation and gigantic mental impact due to the process of modernization, which has been Manray Hsu’s particular focus, have left a whole generation with an intertongued memory. Just like the shattered, yet critically harsh, bitter pottery pieces that resemble cultural excavation in Masiswagger Zingrur’s “Boasting Phenomenon Series”, the concerns that aboriginal contemporary art once focused on (including its curation thought and discourse) have gone beyond the archaeological mode that dug into and asked for inspiration from the ancient past, and have instead turned to a contemporary point of view that tries to narrate and review modern concerns, “the last mile”. Kulele Ruladen’s “Regenerate Operation of the Bird” and “Proactive Cultural Measuring Instrument”, as well as Aruwai Matilin’s “Modern Primitive” series all try to record a seemingly ridiculous situation, that is still the everyday life of the aboriginal people.
When we try to contemplate from the modernology perspective on the relationship between the “Contemporary Art Exhibition from Greater Sandimen” and the artists from the greater Sandimen art community, we realize that we have to deal with some fundamental questions about aboriginal contemporary art history, and the more we dig, the more an modern logical excavation will emerge. First of all, greater Sandimen artists can be divided into several categories: one is from artisan family heritage, such as the prestigious Pavavalung family’s Pairang Pavavalung (mandarin name: Hsu Kunshen) and Sakuliu Pavavalung; moreover, there is the “father of the modern lazurite bead”, Qumas Zingerur (mandarin name: Lei Tzu) and his two sons, Masiswagger Zingrur and Kulele Ruladen, who separately have taken on the two family names of Zingrur and Ruladen. Furthermore, there are the sister and brother from the Matilin family, Aruwai Matilin and Lavuras Matilin respectively, and also Nitjan Takivalit and his brother Asai from the Takivalit family. The cultivation of these types of artists emanates from their family heritage. The second kind comes from the “Sakuliu School”. The artist Sakuliu began a workshop in the tribe in the 1980s. This is the place where he does research and artistic creation and also where he teaches the young people tribal culture and how to engage in artistic production. The third group is the younger generation itself. Compared to artists from previous generations, the young can gain access to more social resources, such as attending art schools or art departments to acquire modern artistic techniques. The fourth type is the artists who were born into the families of a chief or noble, such as the female artists, Eleng Luluan from Rukai’s Kucapungane tribe and Aluaiy Pulidan from the Tavadran tribe. Even though they do not come from artisan families, because they were born into a chief or noble family, their artistic upbringing stems from their immersion in the material aesthetic heritage of the family.
Since the 1990s, contemporary Taiwanese aboriginal art has naturally divided into two areas, the eastern coast and greater Sandimen in the south. The cause of this divide and the different styles that have emanated have been commented on a lot by critics. Generally speaking, other than the dramatic influence of Taiwanese economic development in the 1980s and the subsequent blooming of the aboriginal movement, greater Sandimen’s geological position made it able to resist the “civilizing” impact of the cities on the western coast. “The people on the slope”, namely the Paiwan and Rukai tribes of the greater Sandimen area, also have a unique concentric circular social structure, which helped them form the long-term practice of a “unifying art and political” system. The rule of authority in the Rukai and Paiwan tribes relies largely on an iconic and signal system, which means it largely depends on the contributions of craftsman families or artisans. This particular and intense functional relationship between the linguistic iconology and the iconic linguistics of the “People on the Slope” has been most manifested and realized in Etan Pavavalung’s artworks. In 2009, after typhoon Morakot hit the greater Sandimen area and forced the Kucapungane, Tavadran, and Majia tribes to be relocated, he combined Paiwan’s abundant iconic system, its mother language, and art to create the unique technique “venecik”.
“His real intention was to start from a Paiwan perspective in order to unmistakably state that their language (Paiwan) has its own fundamental, cultural status and significance. By making the Paiwan language the foundation of their culture means it is also the sum of the content of Paiwan’s sense and sensibility. That is, the combination of the visual sensational content, the abstract imaginary level, and verbal language on the level of everyday life are the complete field of Paiwan’s linguistic practice. For a Paiwan person, visual icons are visualized language, and the verbal language is the linguistic descriptive level of visual sensational contents and abstract imaginative contents. That’s why we always feel that in the icons of traditional Paiwan material civilization, there is such a clear and fixed linguistic linear logic, while Paiwan’s verbal narrative style is like scriptwriting, trying so hard to visualize the scenes in the speakers’ minds.”
The curator Manray Hsu specifically points out that the exhibition touches on the encounter between the “slope people” and the “vertical city”, which represents a foreign power. “The participating artists, all originated in the greater Sandimen region, are from different generations. The postwar political and economical transformations, the White Terror during the Cold War, the various stages of the indigenous peoples’ movement during the democratization period, to recent demands for transitional and historical justice, are all experienced by these artists, each in their own way. Works are spread throughout all the main areas of Culture Park. Each artist presents a minisolo show at their own exhibition venue, be that a traditional house, a museum gallery, or an outdoor space. The exhibition aims to reveal the context in which each artist thinks through their practice to reflect on contemporary culture, its past, present, and future.” This paragraph aptly shows that this exhibition can be regarded as the biggest modern logical event in contemporary Taiwanese aboriginal art history. With the huge amount of art objects and data being “unearthed” from these artists, concerning history, language, and society, we still need to read more, construct more and write more.
