Taiwan，China
Elena Luluan, her Chinese name is An Shenghui, she was born in 1968, Hao Cha Camp, Lukai minority, Pingdong. She graduated from School of Agriculture, Household in Neibu, and he is a member of the Eastern Taiwanese artists ‘Ideology Tribe’, and good at using floating woods, plant fibers etc. natural media to create works. She is exhibited through Europe and Asia, now she works and lives in Hualien, Taiwan, China.
A Star Atlas of Tribes: Fractures in the Memories of Life-Silently Await by Eleng Luluan
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, to awaken the dead, and to make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Sewing complete the atlas of soul
In a description of one of Walter Benjamin’s collection - a watercolor created by Paul Klee in 1920, he said: fractures are representation of the process of history, one historical event is like a fracture sewn to another. The history process Benjamin talked about is like Eleng Luluan’s Fractures in the Memories of Life-Silently Await, it is a reflection of the current condition of tribes in a period of modernization progress in history.
The artist created the Fracutres series in 2008 to honor the memory of her mother’s weaving, trying to memorize her love through rituals for the tribe and her mother. This series picked up deeper meanings after the Typhoon Morakot. The solidarity of tribe families seemed to have found a personal ritual of transformation in weaving art, and a healing ceremony for the wound of the mother earth. The theme of the ritual is a dance of weaving and encircling.
In her early efforts of collecting driftwood to make art installations, Eleng Luluan came upon the material of coconut fiber. Many years later in 2007, she started to use coconut fiber frequently in her fiber artworks made in Huanlien sugar factory. The idea of a fractured atlas was a concept she read about in an article and was surprised that it was just like the coconut tree bark she was sewing. Elang Luluan said the tree bark was like fabric weaved by the nature. Using the iron needle for sewing fishing nets, leather-like tree bark pieces were sewn together and her work Fractures was born.
A Display of the Tenacity of Life
The concept “fractal” was a mathematical theory suggested by a scholar in the 1970s.The seemingly broken, irregular parts are in fact exist in repetitive manners and together they construct an orderly structure. Take ferns as an example, a fern plant is a spiral shaped magnification of smaller structures, in this sense a smaller part is a miniature replica of the whole. The nature is magical in the sense that the microscopic, chaotic parts can form an orderly system. Similar phenomena also exist in basic principles of the Chaos theory, that everything can be interpreted in mathematical equations. The fundamental essence of life is a mysterious force originated from pure reason.
After the Typhoon disaster, a shift took place in the Fractures series. The work was more like a weaving work of those bed sheets in western feminine art before the disaster. Later it transformed into a biological structure of rhizomes, which was inspired by traditional lily rosettes. The Rukai lily rosette uses whole lily flowers as its material with frills on the forehead shaped like lily pedals. In seasons when lilies have not blossomed, the real flowers will be replaced with white papers cut into the shape of petals.
For this reason, the Fractures possesses a life quality. The prototype of this installation is presented through the vitality of plant metaphors. The artist tries to present her work as a healing and a blessing, which is the responsibility of art works; and hopes to gift all living things with the quality of tenacity through the transforming power of art. The Fractures reaches to the primitive basics of life like molecular biology. An open minded artist is obligated to spread the secret knowledge of art frontiers. The Fractures can be categorized in the formless school in the art history. From the perspective of visual psychologies, the Fractures might present the chaotic state when aesthetic process meets collective unconsciousness. Artists are supposed to lead their works to more concrete and specific directions, such as the complete life form in the Fractures, to avoid getting lost in the Kaleidoscope chaos of formlessness.
Cai Huiting
