Eleng Luluan is an installation artist, environmental and textile sculptor.
2023 year exhibited in Biennial Find out more
Eleng Luluan was born in the Kucapungane (Haocha) community, Pingtung County in southern Taiwan. She started her exposure to contemporary Indigenous art to seek a space for self-determination and artistic life in 2002, at the age of 28, when she moved to the Dulan community in Taitung in eastern Taiwan. Adhering to the concept of getting close to nature, Luluan uses natural and plain materials in her artistic creation. Constructing and deconstructing mixed-media materials, whose tensile and conceptual strength challenges delimiting gender identities, discourses of settler-colonial, diasporic, migrant, other transnational and transcultural histories of Indigenous ways of knowing in contemporary art, she specialises in sculpture and composite media and environmental installations. Her art practice faces the monumental issues of Indigenous Taiwanese and their communities’ colonial wound and land disaster by inviting us to be witnesses and to engage in caring about what we feel and see. Her deeply intuitive process of the sculpture towards our own poetic and beautiful responses.
Previous projects include: 2012 Artist residency programme in New Caledonia and participated in the joint exhibition Beyond the Boundary: Contemporary Indigenous Art of Taiwan; 2012 First solo exhibition Fractures in the Memories of Life: Silently Awaiting; 2017Between Dream, Rewoven: Innovative Fiber Art, collaborated with Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, Taiwanese American Arts Council, Queens College of Art Center, New York; 2019 Ali Sa Be Sa Be Rugged Rock Cliffs – I Will Miss You in the Future, Tomorrow, Towarding- Resurgence and Solidarity: Indigenous Women’s Art Across the Borders, Taipei MoMA; 2019Between Dream, Moving & Migration, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA), Taiwan and Gyeonggi MoMA, South Korea; 2019Between Dream, Àbadakone – International contemporary Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada
Liverpool Biennial 2023
Ali sa be sa be (2023)
Eleng Luluan presents a monumental sculpture at Princes Dock, Liverpool Waters, inspired by the artist’s memories of growing up in the indigenous Kucapungane community, a Rukai aboriginal village in the mountains of southern Taiwan. ‘Ali sa be sa be’ (2023) depicts the legend of the founder of Rukai, believed to have been born from a pottery jar protected by two snakes. In the Rukai language, the title ‘Ali sa be sa be’ translates as ‘a large rock wall’ or ‘rock bed with sparse vegetation’, referencing the landslides and typhoons common in the artist’s home region. Climate change means that these natural disasters are increasing in frequency, forcibly displacing communities and fracturing their traditions and culture. Through positioning the work between
Eleng Luluan presents a monumental sculpture at Princes Dock, Liverpool Waters, inspired by the artist’s memories of growing up in the indigenous Kucapungane community, a Rukai aboriginal village in the mountains of southern Taiwan. ‘Ali sa be sa be’ (2023) depicts the legend of the founder of Rukai, believed to have been born from a pottery jar protected by two snakes. In the Rukai language, the title ‘Ali sa be sa be’ translates as ‘a large rock wall’ or ‘rock bed with sparse vegetation’, referencing the landslides and typhoons common in the artist’s home region. Climate change means that these natural disasters are increasing in frequency, forcibly displacing communities and fracturing their traditions and culture. Through positioning the work between two bodies of water – the River Mersey and Princes Dock – and by using found and recycled fishing nets as a key material, Luluan asks us to consider our relationship to and reliance on water, and to reflect on the devastating impact of climate change here and around the world. Showing at Princes Dock, Liverpool Waters: Eleng Luluan
Ali sa be sa be (2023)
Showing at Princes Dock, Liverpool Waters: Eleng Luluan
