"Raven, Hundred-Pace Viper, and the Ocean" Cross-Cultural Exhibit in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan Sponsored by the Kaohsiung Commission on Indigenous Affairs and the University of Washington Burke Museum, Seattle

“Understanding the Treasures of Two Worlds Through Artistic Parallels: Written in anticipation of the collaborative exhibition “Raven, Hundred-Pace Viper, and the Ocean” by Lin Yu-shih, Curator (translated by Stevan Harrell)

Speaking form the standpoint of the internal cultural relations of the Native Arts of various countries, we can discover two important inherent relationships: 1) Native Arts can be a vehicle for illustrating the content of cultural changes among Native peoples, the transformations of tribal life, the contact of native Arts with new materials and tools, and the reception of new materials and new markets by the Native Arts. 2) The content and style of Native Arts offer us a channel through which we can understand the reciprocal relations between native groups and outside cultures; ordinarily we are used to looking at the transformation of Native groups after their contact with outside cultures as a tragic drama, but in actuality the creation of contemporary Native are is also part of this transformation, and offers a visible testament to these people’s creativity and vitality. Continued....(keep scrolling down)....

If we want to understand today’s “lively Native arts,” it is very difficult to use a static exhibit; a complete narration of the context of such a complex cultural and artistic transformation would require a grand and expensive exhibition. But here we venture to use “living art forms,” to allow the artist themselves to speak for their won art and culture as embodied in their art. In designing the collaboration, we use a simple comparison between the arts of two regions as the main axis for the design of this exhibit: a cultural comparison and artic collaboration between the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America and of the southern mountains and eastern coast of Taiwan.

The parallel internal and external structures laid out above allow us to carry out analysis and understanding of the content and significance of the artist invited to participate in this exhibition and the cultures that they represent.

1). The tribes of Maritime Culture:
“Northwest Coast Indian Art” usually refers to the coastal areas of Washington State, British Columbia, and Southeast Alaska, or the richest maritime culture among the Indians of North America. And the Taiwan artists invited to this exhibition come form the East Coast and from Santimen in the southern interior, brining together the maritime Amis tribe and the creative artists from Santimen, near geographically and in their keen artistic sense to the maritime capital, Kaohsiung.

2) The close ties between people and their natural environments:
The depiction of beliefs about nature in Northwest Cost Native art—the totem poles, the house posts and painted fronts of wooden longhouses, the bentwood boxes, all made of western red cedar and representing such important creatures from the natural environment as the spirit raven from the myths of the origin of the world, as well as the otters, whales and of the marine animals—mirror the depiction of human-environment relations in the arts of the invited artists from Sentimen and the East Coast of Taiwan, which also have a rich totemic system embodied in myths and legends about nature—the hundred-pace snake, the butterfly, the white lily—as well as the house of driftwood in the newly arisen “Idea tribe” of East Coast artists’ “aft of the tidal zone.” All are outstanding examples of the unity of local natural environment and Native art.

3). Embodying the challenge of traditional and modernity existing together
since 1990, native artists of Taiwan have given birth to its phenomenon of “Taiwan Contemporary native Art,” including the creation of a new artistic language straddling the boundary of tradition and contemporaneity, renovation of artistic materials, delving deep into ethnic cultural subjectivity creating a transformed subjective identity and other features is this the only such phenomenon in the world? Or can we find startling similarities in the Native cultures or other parts of the world? Through this cultural exchange we can take an exploratory journey down a new path of the spirit of Native art.

The artistic exchange exhibit, “Raven, Hundred-Pace Viper and the Ocean” may perhaps, according to one of the participating artists, turn into a friendly competition between the “Raven Team,” the “Hundred-pace Viper Team” and the “East Coast Team.” In preparing for this exhibition, reading materials about artists both familiar and unfamiliar to me, I learned that among them, some are ebullient, some are shy; some are jocular and witty, some are hesitant and easily moved to tears; three live on the cool and foggy Northwest Coast, six live in tropical Taiwan; five are female, four are male; but over and above their varied individual appearances, I can hear a sound like the distant rumbling heartbeat of ocean waves----

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* Read Clarissa's Photo Essay (in Three Parts) of her cross-cultural experiences in Taiwan with fellow Northwest Coast artists Shgen George and Shaun Petersen.

Gathered in front of the large billboard outside of the Taiwan Commission on Indigenous Affairs bulding. Lto R: Kulele, Eren, Joseph, Shgen, Jordan, Daki, Shaun, Nikar, Dodo, Liyah, Hana, Siki, Bill. Front: Clarissa with Siki's two daughters.

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