It is about Me, Not Heritage

Golden Life, Labay Eyong. Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park

“Because it is making love,” Labay Eyong answers my question to the choice of presenting her latest piece ‘Golden Life’ at an insignificant corner at Taiwan Indigenous Cultural Park’s parking lot. She looks at those three giant masses forming in distance and laughs carelessly.

It is a piece of fragmental land facing Ailiao River and surrounded by tall walls and three Camphor trees. Labay Eyong simulates the waves running through lands by the form of weaving. She builds a three-meter high hollowed-out welding iron strips installation with gold painting. It hides itself in a narrow space covered by dense branches, and its two ends open outwards. Emptiness and fullness are crisscrossed, “like a vaginal”, she says. In old Truku’s stories, women are lands and men are rivers. Water marks will remain when men go through women. This small hidden corner of where her piece is will have puddles after the rain. Mud and water will be mixed and inseparable. “Isn’t it like in the middle of love-making?” she says.

Labay Eyong Photo by IPCF

Due to her disgust to restriction and institutional limitation, Labay Eyong didn’t like art classes in her growth. She still embarks on the road of art out of her love for painting. Majored in metalworking and devoted to another experimental artform, temporary space, as studied in graduated school in Spain. The media of her creation is not two dimensional anymore. “I need this hands-on process, to feel the material before working on it. I never draw a draft. Draft lies. My art is organic. The layers need to be built up.” She loves three-dimensional works, and dancing. These are space related interests. “Indigenous people are very close to bodies. Our body, mind and soul are integral as a whole.”

Carefree she seems now, she had uneasy times before. Her works mirrored her status. ‘My Traditional Costumes Are Not Traditional’ in 2012 showed she standing in front of a large clump of miscanthus. She was in white apparel with many limp hands attached on and her face was covered by long braid. That image terrified a lot of children in village, claiming it’s ‘ghostly’. In Truku’s sayings, the dead’s spirits will attach on miscanthus. Labay Eyong was sick that year. Her body, mind and soul had been through severe struggles as if her own spirit was absent.o-exist at the same time.

Labay Eyong just turned thirty years old that year, doing what she liked, having an independent life in others’ eyes. “I was actually terrified. I thought that a woman should be beautiful at age thirty, dressing herself up to attract the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation, carrying the social responsibilities of getting married and having children etc. But I didn’t really know what I wanted the most. I was uneasy, uncertain and unfree.”

At the first years of her return to Taiwan, she questioned her indigenous identity as well. She mocked herself as a ‘bastard’ for having bloodlines of Chinese, Minan, Japanese and Truku. Even though she grew up in Ihownang village in Hualien, her civil service family was very much Sinicized. It abated her tribal experiences and caused her self-consciousness of the void ‘indigenous identity’.

Owe to the numerous weaving machines and textiles that her grandmother left her, she was able to return to her Truku tradition as being at her great loss. She published ‘Tminum Pdsun’ in 2011; collaborated with Italian film director, Tommaso Muzzi, for ‘Nii Nami’; and made public art piece, ‘Elug Tminun’, a collective work of thirty weaving women at Xincheng Railway Station in 2015. Female issues and self-identity are the significant themes of these works which also disclose her conflicts inside. “A female Truku would be recognized as a woman and allowed to get face-tatooed and married only when she knows how to weave. These are the past values yet I was living in them. I was trapped. But the way I tried to solve these perplex was escaping to - weaving.

In the end, it’s children to ‘make her a woman’.

“I was weak, unrooted. There was no stand in my works, they are feeble. My children fixed me. Now I am stable and decisive. My artworks are getting bigger and bigger. They invite viewers’ entries.”

Labay Eyong appears to be a very sensual creator. Her instinct comes prior to thinking. She also describes herself as a life-giver in terms of artmaking. “I am like a producer who extends and duplicates one element unlimitedly and feels her own existence by a mass. I feel the same as I am breast-feeding my child. My body is simply to provide another life’s continuation. You don’t think about meanings of it. It is very straightforward, quite animal. Here’s a life in front of you and he needs you.”

Despite the statement of ‘Every piece is artist’s child’ is corny, what she talks about: nature, body, women, birth, creation etc. all truly matter to her. The ultimate element of her work is love. “Love is beyond romantic feelings. Love could be the passion between men and women. Love needs practice and nurture. Love is all.” She tells me that Truku people were forced to leave home in Japanese ruled period. The most important property for every Truku women as she moving was her weaving machine. “That’s why I have my grandmother’s weaving tools. I believe it is a collective love action. Because all these weaving fabrics are for children.”

We are quiet as looking at the hollowness of the beginning of life. There are two Paiwan young men assist to finalize the painting for ‘Golden Life’. Their dark bodies disappear and reappear again within the golden installations. I hear she sighing with satisfaction and saying “Ah, how much I love that hole.”

Note. Labay Eyong made ‘Golden Life’ at her residency at Indigenous Cultural Park in Pingtung, 2017. It is finished and displayed on 2^nd December.

《Mshjil孕育生命的人》 Photo provided by IPCF
《Mshjil孕育生命的人》 Photo provided by IPCF