Reflections on Indigenous Photomedia Art Practice in Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand .

Taiwan’s Contribution to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2022, and Reflections on the Work of Photomedia Artists with Indigenous Heritage in Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand

Author: Hugh Hudson│Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Art History at National Taiwan Normal University

Between Earth and Sky: Indigenous Contemporary Art from Taiwan in this year’s Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) comprises the work of eight Indigenous Taiwanese artists, and is undoubtedly the most extensive exhibition of its kind to be shown in Australia to date. This signal achievement is worth reflecting on itself, but it also provides an opportunity to consider the varied circumstances of Indigenous artists in our region. While a growing body of evidence suggests the Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan may share ancestral links, they have each known quite different histories of colonization and postcolonialism, and so, their current political and social circumstances are distinct in many ways. What they still have in common is their unique status as First Nation peoples, as well as the ongoing struggle for acknowledgement of, and reparation for, historical injustices, and equality of opportunity in the present. The focus of this presentation comes from my interest in photomedia. Photomedia has notably been embraced by Indigenous artists across the Asia-Pacific, such that now, some of the most widely recognized artists with Indigenous heritage work in photomedia. One may add, in the cases of Tracey Moffatt, in Australia, and Lisa Reihana, in New Zealand, that they are among the most successful artists of any heritage in their countries. In this presentation, I will draw on personal observation, professional experience, and academic research, to reflect on three subjects: first, the photomedia works in Between Earth and Sky; second, the development of Indigenous art discourse as I have witnessed it; and third, the current circumstances of Indigenous photomedia artists in Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

Indigenous Taiwanese Photomedia Art in Between Earth and Sky

The starting point for this presentation is a discussion of Taiwan’s contribution this year to the Asia-Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. The Indigenous Taiwanese curators, Manray Hsu and Etan Pavavalung, and Australian curator Reuben Keehan, have brought together diverse work by eight Taiwanese artists with Indigenous heritage. Here, I will discuss the two works of video art by Fangas Nayaw and Dondon Hounwn.

It is probably significant that the work of both artists is concerned with the perpetuation of Indigenous customs and culture, albeit expressed through quite different artistic strategies. The preservation of surviving Indigenous culture and the recovery of lost or forgotten culture is a common concern of recent Indigenous Taiwanese art and writing. For example, it is evocatively described in Faisu Mukunana’s autobiographical short story My Dear Ak’i, Please Don’t Be Upset published in English in 2021. Mukunana is a woman of the Tsou people, traditionally from central, southern Taiwan, and is a Christian married to a man of Han heritage. Her narrative takes the form of an address to the spirit of her grandfather. It provides a poignant and at times wry account of the haphazard nature of forgetting and the conscious effort of remembering ancestral and traditional knowledge, through periods of colonization and cross-cultural exchanges, over the course of several generations. The narrator apologizes to the spirit of her grandfather for having left his grave untended for many years, and having even having forgotten its location for a time, before finally recovering and restoring the site.

Fangas Nayaw is of the Amis people, traditionally from Taiwan’s Pacific east coast. He works in a variety of performance artforms, including music, theatre, and choreography. His four-channel video work La XXX punk (16:9, 30 minutes, colour, sound, 2021) was  commissioned for the APT10. In it, a future indigeneity is represented through choreography, staging, sound, and video post-production, not as a technological utopia, but as an uncertain and fragmented experience of reconstituted, half-forgotten cultural forms. The four video channels can be read as comprised of two pairs: one pair focusing on the dancers’ heads, and one pair focusing on their bodies. Starting with the video showing a dancer’s head facing the camera, behind them are two lines of their fellow dancers, one line of men, and one line of women. Here, the dancer at the front is presented in their individuality. In the corresponding second video from the pair, the head of the same dancer fills the screen while their features are combined visually with those of the other dances, as well as being reimagined through animation, to show a series of heads that are at times seemingly quite familiar, but at other times are strangely hybrid, and sometimes even monstrous. In the third video, dancers move across the screen, wearing minimal, flesh-coloured costumes, their figures partly occluded by white screens. Here, it is as though we see them only partially, and in an unadorned, or blank state. In the corresponding fourth video, the dancers carry items of Indigenous costume in the air, seemingly uncertain of how, or in what combination, to wear them. In these four videos, then, Indigenous identity in bodies and costume is reconfigured in a somewhat puzzling, kaleidoscopic vision.

Dondon Hounwn is of the Truku people, traditionally from northern Taiwan. He has a series of three single-channel video works in Between Earth and Sky: 3M—MLUQIH Wound, 3M—MHADA Maturity, and 3M—MSPING Adornment (16:9, colour, sound, 2018) from the 3M—Three Happenings series). Each video features a ritualistic performance by the artist, in which the role of bearer of Indigenous customary knowledge is negotiated with fellow Indigenous. In 3M—MLUQIH Wound, the neglect of one’s customary knowledge leads to unhealthy alternatives of alcohol and cigarettes, and preoccupation with money. In 3M—MHADA Maturity attempts to express one’s customary knowledge among others leads to disagreement and conflict. In 3M—MSPING Adornment acceptance of others’ customary knowledge and practices displaces one’s own individuality. Thus, establishing a place for Indigenous customary knowledge is represented in this series of videos as necessary but fraught.

Developing Indigenous Art Discourse, between Australia and Taiwan

At this point, I will present something of a personal digression, with an account of how in my lifetime I have seen Indigenous art emerge as a central concern of contemporary culture and art history in Australia, how I have learnt to engage with it, and how I have maintained my particular interest in Indigenous photomedia in Taiwan.

When I was at school in Australia in the 1970s, Indigenous culture was barely taught—only very briefly, and not in any depth or breadth. It was not until I studied art history at The University of Melbourne that I had an opportunity to learn more, when a new course ‘Aboriginal Art and Culture’ was established by Dr Roger Benjamin, in the mid-1990s. If I remember well, the content of the course was largely about what could be called ‘neo-traditional’ Indigenous painting. This refers to the transformation of traditional designs from Indigenous body painting, bark painting, rock painting, rock carving, and designs marked in the earth, as these designs were adapted to new formats using new materials, from the seminal 1971–1972 Honey Ant Dreaming mural painting at Papunya Special School, to the international success of Emily Kam Kngwarreye’s monumental, polymer on canvas paintings of the 1990s.

At The University of Melbourne there were a number of issues around Indigenous discourse that we addressed. One issue was the fact that in the 1990s, contemporary Indigenous art was commonly divided into two categories: Aboriginal art (signifying ‘neo-traditional’ art), and the less well known ‘urban Aboriginal art’ art (referred to the work of Indigenous artists living in cities, and working in contemporary media, such as photography and video, often without explicit use of traditional Indigenous images, designs, or forms). Tracey Moffatt was considered the leading ‘urban Aboriginal artist’ at the time. In particular, we watched Moffatt’s ambitious 1989 moving-image work Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy. It combines elements of Hollywood-esque melodrama, black humour, and arthouse sensibility, centring on the tedious existence of a woman with Indigenous heritage caring for an elderly white woman, possibly her mother, in a remote, rural location. The role of the carer was performed by Marcia Langton, and Langton would later become, if not the first, then certainly the first high-profile professor of Indigenous heritage at The University of Melbourne. Using the phrase ‘urban Aboriginal art’ likely served a useful purpose at the time, to raise awareness of emerging art practices. However, it has since fallen out of use, as the diversity and non-binary aspects of Indigenous art and identity have been recognized.

After completing a bachelor degree in the arts, I returned to do a graduate-level curatorship course, which ended with an internship at the National Gallery of Victoria. By the 1990s, Indigenous Australian art was becoming well established in the major state art museums. The National Gallery of Victoria had appointed Judith Ryan (now styled Judith Ryan AM) as Curator of Indigenous Australian art. As part of my internship, I assisted in the installation of the 1998 exhibition of Indigenous Australian silk batiks she curated, called Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait. Batik is, of course, a traditional Indonesian technique of textile dying. But it is characteristic of Indigenous Australian artists that they have often been open to using non-traditional materials and non-traditional techniques, and open to adapting traditional imagery to new formats.

I went on to work at the National Gallery of Victoria in a project rehousing the Indigenous bark painting collection. Bark painting is a traditional Indigenous artform, but the artists adopted synthetic glue binder to provide a more durable adhesion of pigments, and the sizes of the barks got larger and larger, much larger than would likely have been the case in pre-colonial times. This larger scale worked well for the display of bark paintings in the setting of the National Gallery of Victoria, with its enormous exhibition spaces, built for large-format international painting and sculpture.

 My first professional experience with Indigenous photomedia art was working in the registration team of the Melbourne International Biennial, in 1999. The work of the two Indigenous Australian photomedia artists was included in the exhibition: Destiny Deacon and Brenda L. Croft. I assisted with the installation of Croft’s photomontage work west/ward/bound, which repurposed family archival images representing members of her relatively prosperous, urban family of Indigenous heritage—imagery still rarely seen in mainstream Australian media.

Eventually, I found work teaching bachelor of photography students at a private sector college in Melbourne. This is when I acquired my interest in photomedia. For the college, I convened two iterations of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale Symposium. By chance, the Indigenous Welcome to Country for the 2015 symposium was provided by the father of Bindi Cole, now Bindi Cole Chocka. Her early photographic work Not Really Aboriginal, from 2008, had been widely feted. The series featured her own family—with Indigenous heritage, but fair skinned—donning blackface as a riposte to those who might doubt the family’s Indigenous heritage on such superficial grounds as skin colour. However, years later, the artist is now less convinced of the value of such confronting identity politics, and her political views have also changed a lot, demonstrating the complex and sometimes fluid nature of discussions about Indigenous identity.

Since starting work at National Taiwan Normal University I have organized a moving image festival, (21) produced a video project in Taiwanese photomedia art, and taken classes to study at Lightbox. (22) In Fall semester of last year, I opened a new course on contemporary photomedia art in the Asia Pacific. The course begins with discussion of Taiwanese Australian, and New Zealand, artists with Indigenous heritage, and this provides the basis for the next part of this presentation.

Australian, New Zealand, and Taiwanese Photomedia Artists with Indigenous Heritage

Australian photomedia artists with Indigenous heritage have established a substantial profile over the last four decades or so. (24) The work of Tracey Moffatt, Destiny Deacon, Ricky Maynard, Michael Cook, Fiona Foley, Vernon Ah Kee, Brenda L. Croft, Bindi Cole Chocka, Christian Bumbarra Thompson, Nici Cumpston, Brook Andrew, and Leah King-Smith has been widely exhibited and collected, and their names are known across the Australian arts sector, not only among photomedia cognoscenti. If one includes photojournalism, then one can add Mervyn Bishop to the list.

I am not including the work of documentary film makers and feature film makers in the category of photomedia art, because the institutions that support and exhibit their work are usually not the same. However, it is worth noting that Screen Australia, the government-funded organization supporting the screen industry, reported that in the three decades from the 1980s to the 2000s, 335 documentaries were credited to 133 individual Indigenous directors. While 11 feature films were credited to 8 individual directors.[1]

Naturally, there would be many contributing factors in the success of Australian photomedia artists with Indigenous heritage. However, I would venture that important factors would be the availability of higher education courses allowing students to specialize in photomedia, and public art museums promoting Indigenous art. In Australia, students can enroll in bachelor of photography or master of photography courses, with some instruction in video usually offered in these courses, or students can enroll in a master of fine arts or PhD in fine arts, with the choice of using photomedia in their creative work. RMIT University in Melbourne claims to have the oldest post-secondary photography program in the world, and the number of higher education photomedia courses in the country has grown over recent decades. It should be pointed out also that as well as providing training for students, these courses provide employment to photomedia artists supplementing their income with teaching.

From the 1970s, photography gradually became recognized as an art form in public arts institutions, with the appointment of photography curators—collecting photography, developing exhibitions, and contributing to photomedia discourse. This development coincided with the recognition in public art institutions of Indigenous art as an area to be supported, with the appointment of dedicated curators, exhibitions, publications, and public programs. (25) A key development in this respect, was the founding of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1973, two years after the founding of The Photographer’s Gallery in London. It was the Australian Centre for Photography that gave Tracey Moffatt her first major solo exhibition, in 1989, in which her successful series Something More was shown.

The Taipei Fine Art Museum hosted Tracey Moffatt’s self-titled solo exhibition in 2001, a time when Moffatt’s work featured in dozens of exhibitions all over the world. It was an early example of the exhibition in Asia of work by an Australian photomedia artist with Indigenous heritage. Another key figure in this area has been the Australian curator Natalie King. She curated Destiny Deacon’s solo exhibition, Walk and Don't Look Blak, shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2006, among other venues. This was followed by Shadowlife, co-curated with Djon Mundine, shown at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2012, and other venues, and Episodes: Australian Photography Now, co-curated with Youngmi Park, for the Dong Gang International Photo Festival, in South Korea in 2014.

It is fair to say that while photomedia art is now well established in Australian higher education and public arts institutions, its status fluctuates. Dedicated exhibition spaces for photography in public galleries come and go, and the fortunes of public art galleries wax and wane. The Australian Centre for Photography is a case in point, experiencing a slow decline in recent years. It was perhaps a victim of its own success, having helped raise the status of photography to the point where photography departments were established in state art museums across the country, and photography courses were opened in universities and colleges. So, it could be said that the Australian Centre for Photography helped create its own competitors. My colleague and friend, Dr Allison Holland, was the last curator at the Australian Centre for Photography, before its operation were suspended during the pandemic. We were actually working on a project for an exhibition of Australian and Taiwanese photomedia when it closed. Fortunately, the not-for-profit Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne has managed to continue, and the local-government-funded Monash Gallery of Art, which specializes in photography, also in Melbourne, helps sustain photomedia culture. Bricks and mortar commercial galleries specializing in photography, on the other hand, are rare across most of Australia, although photomedia artists seem to be well represented in the commercial gallery system, generally.

From New Zealand, Lisa Reihana’s moving image work in Pursuit of Venus [infected], of 2015–2017, has achieved international recognition for its ambitious scale, technical accomplishment, cosmopolitan outlook, and rich content. I saw the work in 2018 at the Pulima Art Festival, called ‘Micawor,’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Taipei. Reihana has acknowledged the contribution that New Zealand’s successful film industry provided in the technical development of in Pursuit of Venus [infected]. If my presentation today has a thesis, it would be that photomedia artists of Indigenous heritage do not generally succeed in isolation, but at least partly through finding opportunities in a successful, multi-cultural education and arts ‘ecosystem,’ and one with a sophisticated discourse around Indigeneity.

When I started preparing my course ‘Contemporary Photomedia Art in the Asia Pacific,’ I have to admit that I knew little of Taiwanese artists of Indigenous heritage. From Liang Tsao-Pin at Lightbox in Taipei, I learnt about Chin Cheng-Tsai, of the Bunun people, traditionally from the central mountain ranges of Taiwan. (28) His series (寂 靜 的 槍 聲 (translatable as Silent Gunshot, c. 2000–2003) and 中央山 脈 的 縱 行 者 (translatable as Climbers of the Central Mountains, n.d.) is available online, although I was not able to find much information about the photographer in English. (29) nIn the course, I drew parallels between the photography of Taiwan’s Chin Cheng-Tsai and Australia’s Ricky Maynard. Both have used black and white photography to document traditional Indigenous practices, such as hunting, as well as landscapes of significance for Indigenous people.

That said, there are relatively few Taiwanese artists with Indigenous heritage actively exhibiting photography at present, to my knowledge. The reason for this is not clear. It may result from fewer educational opportunities. There is apparently only one bachelor of photography course in Taiwan, but it is dedicated to photojournalism, rather than art. There are combined photography and communication master’s degrees, but again these courses generally do not really train artists. Master of fine arts and practice-led Phd courses allow

X.,students to work in photomedia, but it seems few Indigenous students enroll.

Another possible explanation is that by the time Indigenous Taiwanese contemporary art began to gain widespread recognition in the 1990s, alongside the more familiar traditional forms of music, weaving, and architecture, the rise of video art had already transformed the international exhibition landscape. It may be for this reason that whereas photography has been widely practiced by Indigenous Australian artists from the late 1970s, the adoption of photomedia art in New Zealand and Taiwan has more conspicuously tended towards video.

Biography

Assistant Professor Hugh Hudson has taught in the Graduate Institute of Art History at National Taiwan Normal University since 2017. His research publications cover a very wide range of topics, from medieval manuscripts to nineteenth-century photography. His professional practice has largely been in higher education and art museums. In recent years, he has become increasingly involved in the study of photography history and contemporary photomedia.