11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Eleng Luluan belongs to the generation of indigenous artists who were deeply affected by questions of cultural identity in the 1990s. She works across a range of materials and motifs to create expansive sculptures and installations renowned for their tension and power. Luluan is a Rukai woman, born in the old Kuchapungan community of the mountainous eastern part of Southern Taiwan’s Pingtung County. Her mother was a Rukai chief, and Luluan is recognised as a princess in her community. After working a number of part-time jobs, Luluan’s artistic practice emerged from an early career in flower arranging. In 1998, she participated in one of Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s first exhibitions of contemporary aboriginal art, and in 2002 joined the Consciousness Tribe experiment, a cross-cultural indigenous artist community that developed around Dulan and Chinzen beach in Taitung County on the east coast. The Consciousness Tribe rejected the notion that artists should adhere to the thematic and material traditions of their particular heritage, instead embracing an experimental approach that combined indigenous knowledge with contemporary perspectives. Luluan first became widely known for her ambitious, architectural-scale outdoor driftwood installations, made in keeping with the Consciousness Tribe’s zero-waste ethos and preference for recycling materials found along the beach. As her practice evolved, she began to incorporate other natural materials into her work, such as coconut fibre, hemp and wool, as well as cast-offs like plastic and metal. Her installations combine delicate weaving techniques with a dynamic spatial sensibility, continuing to utilise waste materials in new and surprising ways. Luluan’s 2012 work Between dreams , for example, is a dense yet lyrical suspended weave of unrecyclable white styrofoam fruit bags that cascade and resolve into embracing tendrils. For her contribution to the 2023 Liverpool Biennale, Luluan refigured environmentally destructive nylon fishing nets into the form of a giant pottery jar, symbolising the origin of life in indigenous Taiwanese Rukai tradition. In her latest work, commissioned for the Asia Pacific Triennial, Luluan draws on the Rukai concept of wabacabacas, where the movement of the hand embodies thoughts, beliefs, history and culture. The process of weaving extends beyond the work’s material basis to acknowledge the contribution of Luluan’s community in the evolution of her consciousness and creativity. Accordingly, Luluan incorporates what she calls an ‘interweaving’ of the voices of key community members into the work itself through specially created digital material accessible through embedded QR codes, with an emphasis on music, songs, stories and languages threatened with extinction. The work draws explicitly on the form of the typhoon, a meteorological reality for indigenous people across southern and eastern Taiwan, capable of destroying and dispersing entire communities. At the same time, Luluan describes the typhoon as a metaphor for the social and cultural forces experienced by indigenous people outside of their communities, especially when those communities face threats of their own. Luluan’s home village of Kuchapungan had already moved to a second location when it was buried in a landslide during 2009’s deadly Typhoon Morakot. Aside from its impacts on life and property, relocation in the wake of the disaster posed questions of sovereignty and access to traditional lands. A projected increase in the severity of these events due to anthropogenic climate change is therefore a serious concern. For Luluan, the principles of wabacabacas and interweaving are central to building cultural resilience, woven from knowledge, experience and mutual support, whose tensile strength might sustain the community into an uncertain future. REUBENKEEHAN RUKAI PEOPLE BORN 1968, HAOCHA (KUCHAPUNGAN) COMMUNITY, PINGTUNGCOUNTY, TAIWAN LIVES+WORKS INDAWU, PINGTUNGCOUNTY ELENGLULUAN Maka Irualrumalane (installation views, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand) 2024 / Fishing net, rope, thread, coffee sacks / Images courtesy: The artist / Photographs: Cheska Brown ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 144 — 145