As the flames darted up the columns and walls of the massive wooden Matsu temple (媽祖廟) in the middle of the Nevada desert, each team member looked on, their breaths taken away and replaced with a flood of emotions and thoughts as their three-month long, NT$20 million project burned brightly against the night sky.
Dream Community (夢想社區), an artistic community and foundation in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止), coordinated the Matsu temple project for last month’s Burning Man festival, a week-long creative gathering of 70,000 souls, featuring large-scale installations and all sorts of creative expression, where there is no money but only gifting and sharing. Per festival tradition, all artwork is to be burned to the ground with no trace left behind, not even a hair.
The project included a Taiwanese village complete with betel nut beauties and a night market while hosting workshops such as the Eight Generals (八家將) dancing and tai chi. Team members and random participants marched in an hour-long modernized, carnival-esque version of the Matsu Pilgrimage (媽祖繞境) parade. The temple was topped with a giant lotus and eight iron dragons, and visitors prayed and had their fortunes told with divination blocks. When someone got three lucky divination throws in a row, the iron dragons on the roof breathed fire.
Photo courtesy of Wang Chung-hsin
Construction was carried out by crews stateside, while Dream Community staff and volunteers trained with a group of “Asian Youth” from various countries to run the day-to-day activities at the festival. The two-month preparation included practicing traditional dances, making costumes, reciting Matsu sutras and learning how to roast Taiwanese sausages, night-market style.
MAN OF DESTINY
It had been a long struggle for Dream Community chairman Gordon Tsai (蔡聰明), who had been trying to enter Burning Man since 2005. The festival, which he attended eight years ago, has influenced him so much that one of the stipulations to purchase a unit in his community is to participate in Burning Man or something similar.
Photo courtesy of Wobsarazzi
This year, Tsai dealt with issues from coordinating with artists to equipment malfunctions, finally punctuated by a massive sandstorm during the evening of the burning that could have ruined the finale.
Tsai believes in destiny and miracles. Right after the final performance in front of the temple, the storm completely stopped. Then the torching began.
“Throughout the process, I almost gave up so many times,” the self-described madman and dreamer says. “But there are many things in life that test if you’re destined for this path, and the Heavens still helped me at the last minute.”
Tsai’s a go big or go home guy. He says spending NT$20 million was well worth it, because he has realized another one of his dreams, which not only includes representing Taiwan and Asia with a large-scale project at Burning Man, but also “rewriting” the festival.
“We want to introduce some new concepts to the festival,” he says. “Hippies are a Western thing, so why would I copy that? I want to portray something different, something that shows the distinctness of Asian culture.”
Tsai is now eyeing other international festivals to lead more Asian Youth teams to participate in, but his ultimate goal with this venture goes beyond that. He wants to expand on the Asian Youth concept and provide an open platform for creative collaboration between artists in Asia and around the world.
While Tsai is now bringing Asia to Burning Man, he also wants to encourage the Burning Man spirit in Asia. He talks about creating his own globally-attended festival in Asia one day and hopes to serve as a “bridge with which Asia can advance into the world” and become as globally influential as Western culture is today.
“I want to conquer the world,” he says at one point.
WORTH IT
Tears streamed down team member Chang Hua-jung’s (張華蓉) face as she watched the temple burn, in part because months of hard work finally came to fruition, but also because she was moved by the beauty of the spectacle.
“I saw the fire run, dart and move,” she says. “Then it darted through my heart, and my heart started moving with it.”
It was a moment of validation for Gao Fang (高放), a Chinese living in Singapore who quit a stable job to become one of the project’s Asian Youth.
“I felt that I made the right decision,” she says. “The results weren’t important. I had friendship, help, trust, caring … I went to a place where you can’t pay to go to and saw a performance that you can’t pay to see.”
WHAT IS CRAZINESS?
Yes, for a festival like this, people are unconventionally clad and many simply walk around naked. Debauchery, such as drugs and sex parties also exist. But so does a whole lot more, Chang says.
She says that the debauchery is often what people unfamiliar with the festival seem to fixate on, because it’s what’s not accepted in regular society. When what’s usually considered crazy becomes readily available, then it’s not crazy anymore and not everyone will feel the need to partake, she says.
Instead, many team members found more fascinating the lesser-discussed parts of the festival, such as discovering that some people attend just to spend all week picking up trash, people who are simply there to give and provide their services to other people, a naked old man who spent the whole time picking up and giving away bicycles or people visiting the Matsu temple and suspending themselves in the air with hooks in their body.
Chang says she has heard people talking about the Burning Man world and the “real” world as two distinct existences, and how they feel that they have to go back every year to relive the experience.
“If you go there for one week to do things you wouldn’t usually have the courage to do, does that mean you can’t be your true self anymore after you leave? To me, ‘once in your lifetime’ doesn’t mean just doing something crazy and leaving it at that. It extends into your everyday life.”
Yet, Tsai says he does plan on going back for at least the next two years with an even better project each time, as there is still much to learn. That’s at least NT$40 million more, and we can only wait for what his band of dreamers come up with next year.
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