Eleng Luluan is a Rukai artist whose ambitious, architectural-scale installations express the culture and resilience of her indigenous Taiwanese community. Her work combines delicate weaving techniques with a dynamic spatial sensibility, utilising waste materials in new and surprising ways.

Luluan’s commission for the Asia Pacific Triennial draws explicitly on the form of the typhoon, a meteorological reality for indigenous people across southern and eastern Taiwan that is increasing in ferocity due to climate change. At the same time, the typhoon serves as a metaphor for the social and cultural forces experienced by indigenous people outside of their communities.

Luluan draws on the Rukai concept of wabacabacas, where the movement of the hand embodies thoughts, beliefs, history and culture. The process of weaving extends beyond the work’s material basis to acknowledge the contribution of the artist’s community in the evolution of her consciousness and creativity. Accordingly, Luluan incorporates what she calls an ‘interweaving’ of the voices of key community members into the work itself, through specially created digital material, with an emphasis on music, songs, stories and languages threatened with extinction.

In the face of such challenges, the principles of wabacabacas and interweaving are central to building cultural resilience, woven from knowledge, experience and mutual support, whose tensile strength might sustain the community into an uncertain future.