Unreproducible Mistakes are Beautiful Too

“I need to put them back to where they should be and close the door now. Otherwise it would be a mess.” There is a system cabinet against the wall in her small studio where she shortly residents in Taitung Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries Park. In that cabinet, she storages all the material she needs in her progressing ‘Yearly Ceremony Project’. She plans to make 365 long weaving objects as symbols of life. Eleng Luluan thinks that there are plural meanings of ‘ceremony’, it can be seasons, festivals or records. Every moments of her life: her sadness, joy, sorrow, anger and confusion will become brocade.    

Before being an artist at age 28, Eleng Luluan used to be a florist. In addition to natural material, she also collected all kinds of objects and making works out of them. Her perception is full of different fleeting images, sounds, touching memories at all times. The past and the future driven by the desire of creating keep expanding. Sometimes it is too heavy and intense that she suffers from the pressure: “what about me? I don’t know where I am.”

When she was young, before 30 years old, she had lived in a van for a whole year. Her friend felt sorry for her simple and crude life style. But her experience of meeting the Floated Tribe at Jinzun Beach and the artists community at Dulan sugar factory pull her between her hometown, Pingtung, and Taitung. “Moving calmed me down. It was too crowded at both sides. I’d rather be on the road than choosing where to stay.”  

“I mess up my body. What was easy for me before becomes difficult now. I feel weak and fragile, like I would be broken anytime.” Eleng Luluan says that one day she was moving the tangled iron bars and suddenly felt the urge of throwing them roughly for no reason. “It made me feel so good. Then I realized that I have been treating my body in such violent way for years. I couldn’t move an inch that very night.”

She obsesses on weaving every daily moment now. “This is a ceremony of transition of my life.” On the first day of 2018, she combined the materials both with and without elasticity, wove a slender but tight, lose but intertwined, an unpredictable three-dimensional wave. “Every moment in life is so precious. Like everything awakes, I do too. I can see the present, the high and low points in my life and enjoy the moments. It opens up the old self that was closed too much. I still have confusing reality to deal with every day. But I am happy now.”
 
“Weaving is a very rigorous technique, very much ordered. There is no room for mistake. But I do love this kind of mistake. It leaves an unreproducible and beautiful mark. Because all emotions are naturally expressed as weaving, whether its’s restless or heavy. I love these mistakes, they are allowed. Even some stiches are missing, I still find them perfect.”   
 
Eleng Luluan caresses the weaving threads which remind her of those parasitic plants growing wildly in forest at her childhood home, Kucapungane. Thinking of that vigorous expansion, she says:” I don’t want to behave myself. This is me, enjoy being lost and confused.” 

This female artist has her room now, a cabinet with doors. Her world, when she is alone, gets quiet but she still remembers the dream she has while she’s a child. In that dream, she holds the vines, climbs the mountains, crosses the sea and cliffs, and about to reach another place.