Eleng Luluan is an installation artist, environmental and textile sculptor.
2023 Biennial Year 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
'Ngialibalibade – to the Lost Myth' (2023)
Created for Liverpool Biennial 2023, ‘Ngialibalibade – to the Lost Myth’, a continuation of the series ‘Ali sa be sa be’, is inspired by the artist’s memory of growing up in the indigenous Kucapungane community, a Rukai aboriginal village in the mountains of southern Taiwan.
In the Rukai language ‘Ngialibalibade’ means ‘a happening’ or ‘a state of going through’ . It is an adjective that describes the growth of life, the transformation of the soul, the change in nature, the rapid development of technology, the noticeable changes in life, or the subtle ones hiding in our hearts. Landslides and typhoons are common in the Rukai region and are increasing in frequency due to climate change. These natural disasters often cause the communities
Created for Liverpool Biennial 2023, ‘Ngialibalibade – to the Lost Myth’, a continuation of the series ‘Ali sa be sa be’, is inspired by the artist’s memory of growing up in the indigenous Kucapungane community, a Rukai aboriginal village in the mountains of southern Taiwan. In the Rukai language ‘Ngialibalibade’ means ‘a happening’ or ‘a state of going through’ . It is an adjective that describes the growth of life, the transformation of the soul, the change in nature, the rapid development of technology, the noticeable changes in life, or the subtle ones hiding in our hearts. Landslides and typhoons are common in the Rukai region and are increasing in frequency due to climate change. These natural disasters often cause the communities and families based there to become displaced, each time uprooting the villagers’ lives and negatively impacting their cultures and traditions. Legend says that the founder of Rukai was born from a pottery jar protected by two snakes and has become a symbol of new life. The artist, inspired by this legend, has turned the jar into a giant, sacred vessel. Through using hand-woven fishing nets and placing the work between two bodies of water – the Mersey River and Princes Dock – Eleng asks us to consider our relationship and reliance on water, and to reflect on the devastating impact of climate change here and around the world. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, with support from The Alliance Cultural Foundation, Council of Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan, Liverpool BID Company, Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.) and Asian Cultural Council, Taiwan Foundation South 33 Branch. Courtesy of the artist. With thanks to Liverpool Waters, Peel Group.
'Ngialibalibade – to the Lost Myth' (2023)
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Eleng Luluan, Ngialibalibade to the Lost Myth, 2023. Installation view at Princes Dock, Liverpool Biennial 2023. Photography by Rob Battersby. Courtesy Liverpool Biennial.
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Eleng Luluan, Ngialibalibade to the Lost Myth, 2023. Installation view at Princes Dock, Liverpool Biennial 2023. Photography by Rob Battersby. Courtesy Liverpool Biennial.
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Eleng Luluan, Ngialibalibade to the Lost Myth, 2023. Installation view at Princes Dock, Liverpool Biennial 2023. Photography by Rob Battersby. Courtesy Liverpool Biennial.
