As a heart-warming way to greet their aboriginal patients, doctors say "ma ku da soon -- sa er geo," which is the Northern Paiwan dialect for "Aren't you feeling well?" With the health of aboriginal peoples in mind, artist Chang May-ling (張美陵) also uses this phrase to sum up her photographs and furniture installation at DEA.
The exhibition raises questions about the rush to modernize, to assimilate and to homogenize cultures while reminding us to appreciate our differences.
Using Western-influenced medical practices as a metaphor, Chang highlights the positive and negative aspects of modernization in Taiwan's aboriginal communities and examines the health condition of the individual as well as the Paiwan tribe.
Visiting minority communities in Nantou, Pingtung, Taitung, and Orchid Island, Chang has spent two years working on this exhibition, documenting how traditional values are quickly becoming undermined through the processes of assimilation, religious conversion and modernization. Once, aboriginal peoples saw illness as a form of punishment by the gods, but now they blindly put their faith into Western-trained medical doctors.
The exhibition is divided into the public versus the private. Upstairs, a grid of small photographs depicts individual adults seated at a health clinic. Each portrait is blurred, making the individual facial characteristics unintelligible; in effect, the grid must be understood as one entity. The individual body has now become the social body, or the community; yet, the underlying meaning can be more nefarious.
Throughout the world, aboriginal and native peoples are objects of genetic research and experimentation, so the blurring of the figures also alludes to the manipulation and abuses that native peoples undergo in the name of modern science.
Another grid -- this time in focus -- is of silver-framed portraits of the elderly. Each person is seated outdoors near a stone gate. Here, the eye metaphor appears and recalls Susan Sontag's observation that the camera functions as another pair of eyes outside of the body. Each senior covers one eye with his or her hand while the other hand points off to the side, hinting at some type of meaningless communication.
A group of large digital prints show people in various aspects of their daily lives, with many being treated by doctors. Pictures of leg rashes and deformed limbs seem to suggest that these ill people are society's outcasts. Chang had no intention to make viable commercial works or journalistic pieces but tried to highlight some of the problems the Paiwan people face when caught between different cultures. Her work almost crosses the line into social activism but it still maintains a foothold within the art world.
Downstairs, the space is set up like an interior of an aboriginal house with little attention paid to the aesthetic placement of objects. The room has the feel of a natural history museum or mausoleum; it is dark and preserved.
A stuffed fei shu (
The scene is a reminder of how the distinctiveness of a traditional culture is being slowly blunted by the influences of divergent societies.
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