Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

In this exhibition, Rahic managed to advance his previous “Action Project for Typhoon,” and documented the stories of encountering every individual slipper. The stories were not only recorded in words; he also used markers to draw on old fabrics from a sugar refinery the surroundings and imageries associated with the slippers when they were found. In an exhibition room, titled “The Journey Series,” in addition to different documents that recorded his personal, unique encounters with these nameless existences, he included ancient singing in tribal language, creating a captivating power that made people linger. Except for his driftwood sculptures and the slippers that he picked up, he also expanded his use of materials to plastic and glass found on the seashore. Through his personal and physical field research, Rahic succeeded in interweaving and refining the tribal mythology as well as his personal experience and contemplation on the contemporary human condition. (Commentator: LIN Chi-Ming)

Artwork Introduction

Legend has it that when the brother and sister Sra and Nakaw drifted to this peripheral region of the Pacific Ocean, the land itself was still nameless, and the space was in chaos, which only ended after ancestors named the things on this land, and gave them meanings. Today, each reef rock has embodied hundreds of years of accumulated memories, such as the growth of children, intersections in everyday life, elders’ wisdom, tales of warriors, and ancient legends. This remote, narrow piece of land that has no convenient transportation represents the summation of life, an existence longer than every individual life and where everything takes place. Here, memory does not depend on writings, but subtly hides in numerous places being passed in visible and invisible ways—in bonfires in rituals, trajectories of ceramic urns thrown by women, clashing driftwood logs, body movements of brave warriors harvesting seaweeds, seemingly endless nights of mourning the deceased, music and dance of festivals, as well as the unfathomable sea. Naturally, these messages are received in both visible and invisible ways. 

About the Artist 

Rahic Talif was born in the Pangcah tribe Makotaay in Hualien in 1962. He is a professional artist whose practice engages in wood sculpture, installation, performance, architecture, furniture, tribal culture reconstruction, and indigenous social and cultural criticism. He served as the leading “mama-no-kapah” (father of youths) in the age-based tribal hierarchy, and was responsible for guiding tribal youths and organizing/managing the entire tribe. Starting with gathering mythic tales, oral history, and ruins of the ancient tribe, they endeavored to bring back the disappearing tribal wisdom. He has repeatedly led his people to participate in art exhibitions in Taiwan and abroad, as well as engage in the creation of public art projects. In 2000, he was awarded an ACC grant to conduct a field trip to the US, in which he surveyed the local contemporary art activities. In 2014, he was named one of the representative artists of marine culture by the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology. His major works include Modern Meeting Room (1993), Ending and Beginning (1999), Return-to-Zero (2000), The Dance of Standing (2005), Incomplete (2007), Action Project for Typhoon(2008-2013), The Space of Fifty Steps (2013-). He is also the author of Turbid (2006). 

For more than two decades, he has consistently reflected on and explored his own ideas, submerging himself into and accumulating his own creative energy. Using driftwood imbued with life and memory as his medium, his work shatters existing images and understandings of indigenous art. Along his artistic journey, he has moved from the field of cultural interpretation comprising social critique, thinking, reflection, and representation, to the exploration of the pure essence of art. His work primarily embodies the characteristics of marine culture and traditional tribal spirit. He specializes in combining refined sculptural lines and installations constructed with precise vocabularies to convey his environmental and dialectic thinking regarding the topic of globalization, explore the disintegration of the communal structure and the current conditions of the changing society at large, and prompt the audience’s self-reflection through his action and art.