How a new generation of Indigenous artists is redefining Taiwan’s contemporary art scene – The Art Newspaper

When the Indigenous artist Sakuliu Pavavaljung was stripped of Taiwan’s Nationwide Award for Arts following his conviction for sexual assault this April, the case was heralded as a landmark #MeToo second in Asia’s up to date artwork world. Following the downfall of one of many island’s most influential Indigenous artists, a brand new technology of artists is rising and redefining Taiwan’s Indigenous up to date artwork scene.

Two breakout tasks this 12 months spotlight that transformation. In Might the Taipei Performing Arts Middle offered the Taiwan debut of Hagay Dreaming, a collaboration between the digital artwork pioneer Shu Lea Cheang and the Truku artist Dondon Hounwn following its 2025 premiere at Tate Fashionable in London. The next month, Tai Physique Theatre turned the primary Indigenous collective to obtain the grand prize at Taiwan’s Taishin Arts Award.

“For the reason that 2010s, a brand new technology of Indigenous artists has begun difficult the paradigm established within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s,” Wei-Lun Lu, a curator who additionally served as a script advisor for Hagay Dreaming, tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Lots of the artists rising within the 2010s had been academy-trained… Video and efficiency turned more and more distinguished, alongside extra sustained engagement with white-cube contexts.”

At the moment comprising round 2.5% of Taiwan’s inhabitants throughout 17 formally recognised nations, Indigenous peoples had endured successive durations of Han Chinese language settlement, Japanese colonial rule and, after 1949, assimilation beneath the Nationalist authorities. An Indigenous rights motion that emerged alongside Taiwan’s democratisation within the Eighties and 90s introduced calls for for the restoration of language and tradition, in addition to political recognition, into the broader progressive motion.

A extra systematic infrastructure for Indigenous artwork started to emerge within the mid-2000s. “The Kaohsiung Museum of Advantageous Arts has most likely collected probably the most, and most systematically,” says the curator Manray Hsu, who has labored extensively with Indigenous artwork in Taiwan and internationally. The museum launched in 2005 its ongoing programme of up to date Austronesian artwork—a time period that frames Taiwan’s Indigenous cultures inside a wider precolonial community stretching throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The biennial Pulima Artwork Award, established in 2012 as Taiwan’s first devoted Indigenous up to date artwork prize, turned a key incubator for rising artists. It returns subsequent 12 months, alongside the second version of the Taiwan Worldwide Austronesian Artwork Triennial in Pingtung.

Commercially, Taiwan’s Indigenous up to date artwork group stays largely underdeveloped. “At the moment’s gallery system favours a lot smaller-scale works than these seen because the first wave of Indigenous up to date artwork within the Nineteen Nineties, when gathering centered on large-scale installations acquired by museums and tourism resorts,” says Hsu, who additionally curated Artwork Taipei’s Indigenous artwork part in 2023 and 2025. Launched in 2020, that part affords a recurring industrial platform.

Worldwide publicity wanted

Solely a handful of galleries have begun working with Indigenous artists, and infrequently solely these with worldwide exhibition information. Taipei’s Liang Gallery, as an example, offered a solo exhibition by Aluaiy Kaumakan in 2024, following her participation within the 2021 Asia Pacific Triennial and 2022 Biennale of Sydney. The New York-based gallery Nunu Advantageous Artwork has proven Chang En-Man, whose work was featured on this 12 months’s Biennale of Sydney and who may have a solo exhibition with the gallery subsequent 12 months. Ciwas Tahos, after taking part within the 2025 Sharjah Biennial and Hawai’i Triennial, acquired a solo stand with Taipei’s PTT Area at Artwork Basel Hong Kong earlier this 12 months.

“Not like Indigenous literature, which grew extra instantly from the Indigenous rights motion of the Eighties”, up to date Indigenous artwork’s relationship with the state is one among negotiation reasonably than confrontation, in response to Lu. “From the Nineteen Nineties, Indigenous up to date artwork was typically rooted in community-based mentorship and the transmission of conventional crafts.” It emerged after many years wherein assimilation and financial hardship had drawn many Indigenous individuals into cities for work, making the restoration of languages, rituals and cultural data extra pressing.

That cultural revival had gaps. “Sexuality disappears from the traditions which were revitalised. However in [Indigenous] oral histories and on a regular basis life, it’s in every single place,” Lu says. She traces the shift to the 2010s: “By then, I used to be encountering Indigenous artists foregrounding gender and non-binary experiences, however they had been fully absent from journal protection or earlier exhibition histories.”

Lu’s 2023 exhibition Amorous Mountains, Erotic Seas: Queer, Indigene, and the Hidden Historical past on the Pulima Artwork Competition in Hualien addressed that omission. “Transgender efficiency was extraordinarily frequent in Indigenous communities alongside the east coast, however not one of the writing talked about it,” she says. The exhibition sought to make that neglected historical past seen, bringing youthful Indigenous artists along with performers from city east-coast Indigenous drag communities.

“I name it the queer confusion of the 2010s,” Lu says. “Fairly a couple of of the artists don’t current erotic our bodies per se. They current our bodies negotiating the battle between private need and the group and their custom.”

The Amorous Mountains exhibition included works by the artist Ciwas Tahos, who grew up disconnected from her Atayal group’s tradition. “Each Indigenous group present was like a small tribe for me,” she says. “I cherished the openings as gathering factors the place we might trade concepts in regards to the points individuals had been involved with and what was occurring elsewhere. Everybody was in search of factors of resonance.”

Ciwas’s work attracts upon the marginalised Atayal oral fable Temahahoi. “Studying about an all-women mountain group protected by bees made me really feel that there was house for each my gender and Indigenous identities,” she says. “In a society dominated by heterosexual norms, the oral tales left by our ancestors develop into a secure house.”

For the Truku artist and ritual practitioner Dondon Hounwn, Hagay Dreaming begins with a extra private vocabulary. “Hagay is a pathway for understanding individuals like us with out ranging from mounted concepts of female and male,” he mentioned at a 24-hour gathering at his studio in Hualien’s Dowmung tribe late final 12 months. The time period dates to his childhood, when village elders known as him hagay. “Hagay will not be the identical as queer,” he says. “Hagay has ancestral perception. It has ritual.”

Human and religious realms

Bringing Dondon’s Truku cosmology into dialogue with Shu Lea Cheang’s cyberfeminist follow, Hagay Dreaming reworked the Taipei Performing Arts Middle’s Globe Playhouse into an atmosphere of laser gentle, digital imagery and reside efficiency. Its 90-minute creation allegory follows a Truku hunter’s encounter with hagay, tracing a journey between the realms of people and spirits.

For Cheang, a Taiwan-born ethnic Han whose creative language was formed in New York’s queer artwork scene earlier than she settled in Paris, the undertaking upended her understanding of queer life. “Present-day queer life lacks a way of religion—we float,” she says, however “engaged on Hagay Dreaming does solidify some perception. To advertise hagay is to push the Gaya spirit”—a reference to the Truku system of ancestral ideas—“to put down some grounding.”

In final 12 months’s award-winning efficiency qaqay, Watan Tusi (who based the Truku-led collective Tai Physique Theatre in 2012) labored at a standard Truku floor loom. Round him, 5 performers developed a percussive language of barefoot steps, combining floorwork and task-based motion drawn from bodily labour reasonably than conventional dance. The piece, which gained the grand prize from the Taishin Arts Award final November, explores how, through the Japanese colonial interval, his Swsal tribe was forcibly relocated round 100km from its ancestral territory.

The loom evokes this historical past. “Once we transfer, we’d needed to determine how a lot of the outdated belongings to hold into a brand new place, but we’d nonetheless carry the heavy loom with us,” Watan says, changing into a metaphor for what to hold ahead from custom and what to remodel. “Past conventional rituals or performances staged for tourism, what different prospects may Indigenous efficiency maintain?”