{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/tidal-weavers-islands-exchange-hong-gah-museum-taipei-review-panthea-lee/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":124041,"slug":"tidal-weavers-islands-exchange-hong-gah-museum-taipei-review-panthea-lee","title":"The Problem of ‘Heritage’","excerpt":"What if cultural memory were not just fixed inheritance, but a series of practices altered through encounter and translation?","content":"\n

What if cultural memory were not just fixed inheritance, but a series of practices altered through encounter and translation?

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To read the Paiwan flood myth in Chang En-Man’s The Great Deluge: Oral History from Pacavalj (2025), visitors must slowly unroll a cotton scroll by hand and decipher the text via a mirror placed behind it: ‘When the earthworm pooped, its droppings slowly piled up higher and higher. After a long time, they formed a new mountain.’ Developed with the collective Riwanua in Makassar, Indonesia, the work brings a Paiwan story into conversation with the Bugis epic La Galigo. One’s encounter with it is intimate and slightly awkward – the story is cross-stitched in Paiwan, while translations appear separately on a nearby wall; the mirror slows reading, and meaning arrives piecemeal, through handling, reflection, movement and delay. Rather than presenting myth as a static text, Chang stages storytelling itself as an act of tactile transmission. 

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Tidal Weavers: Islands Exchange emerged through collaborations between 14 artists, collectives and cultural practitioners across Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan. Led by artistic director Ade Darmawan (whose work is also on view here) and co-curators Zoe Yeh, Takahashi Mizuki and Bruce Li, the exhibition approaches cultural memory – ritual, craft, song, food, storytelling – not as fixed inheritance, but as practices altered through encounter and translation. Just inside the exhibition entrance, a process video shows the artists being welcomed by their host collectives and communities, moving between festivals, markets, craft workshops and fish barbecues together. The footage might initially seem peripheral – it plays beside the coffee machine – yet it offers glimpses of the activities that shaped the project, from cooking together to conversations that stretched late into the night. 

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Ade Darmawan, Data Threads, 2025 (installation view). Courtesy Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei
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Throughout the exhibition, inherited traditions become surfaces onto which histories and the present conditions of extraction and survival are inscribed. In Ade Darmawan’s Data Threads (2025), statistical diagrams – on human mobility, demographics and environmental change – are absorbed into batik, songket and ikat forms, while ExxonMobil and Pertamina insignias appear alongside regional crests, maps and sacred symbols. Where textiles once encoded human relations to the sacred, contemporary life is now equally patterned by petrochemical power and extraction. In this context, the state and corporate planning charts here appear not only as technical instruments but also as contemporary cosmologies. The result is less a portrait of cultural memory than an account of the forces through which it persists. 

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Meita Meilita’s Wanai Saiji: The Shape of Being (2025), developed with Kavalan elders and PateRongan Studio in Xinshe, Hualien, Taiwan, unfolds across a vast embroidered cotton cloth populated by roosters, mountains, fish, boats, crabs, village scenes and lines of Kavalan song asserting continued existence and presence. The imagery is diaristic and strikingly unmonumental: figures drift across the cloth, like fragments of memory. Embroidered collaboratively by local amas, with large stretches remaining blank, the work never resolves into ethnographic spectacle, resisting the polished authority often expected of museum objects. 

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Yip Kai Chun, My Deity Wants Me to Wear This, 2025 (installation view). Courtesy Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei
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The exhibition also unsettles contemporary art’s tendency to romanticise spirituality while overlooking the obligations it entails. This is evident in Yip Kai Chun’s My Deity Wants Me to Wear This (2025), an installation developed with tatungs – spirit mediums – in Pontianak, Indonesia. Towering lightboxes portray mediums in divinely instructed costumes against tart monochromatic backgrounds. Their poses hover between devotional portraiture, fashion photography and performance documentation. Yet the work’s emotional gravity lies in the accompanying booklets, where tatungs speak of false eyelashes rejected by a deity, beloved foods now forbidden, economic precarity and the fear of misrepresenting tatung history itself. ‘I would rather have a regular job if I could choose,’ one of them admits. Throughout the installation, the mediums emerge neither as relics nor as icons, but as humans navigating the messy demands of ancestral and divine relation. 

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The exhibition foregrounds transnational exchange, while acknowledging the uneven realities shaping whose cultural practices are seen, valued and materially supported. As I exit the show, I find myself back at the process video, where several members of the host communities speak about the need to sell what they make. Their comments raise harder questions about what reciprocity looks like when craft and ritual practices, long marginalised or undervalued, enter contemporary art circuits. No project can resolve these tensions. But what lingers after Tidal Weavers is less an idealised vision of cultural exchange than the ongoing, fragile work of keeping practices and relationships alive across unequal worlds.

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Tidal Weavers: Islands Exchange at Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, 7 March – 31 May

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From the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

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