Breaking Ground: Art and Activism in Indigenous Taiwan

Exhibition Dates｜August 15, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Venue｜Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
（Address: 108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA）
Organizers｜National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA)
Curatorial Team｜Manuela Well-Off-Man, Nakaw Putun, Jay Chun-Chieh Lai

Exhibition Statement｜

Breaking Ground: Art and Activism in Indigenous Taiwan is a cross-cultural collaboration co-organized by National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), opening August 15, 2025, at MoCNA in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man (Chief Curator, MoCNA), independent curator Nakaw Putun, and Jay Chun-Chieh Lai (Assistant Curator, NTMoFA), and features ten artists and artist groups from Taiwan’s Indigenous communities, working across painting, video, sculpture, installation, and net art. Among the participating artists, Iyo Kacaw and Idas Losin have been invited to join MoCNA’s artist residency program to create new site-specific works while in the United States.

The exhibition title, Breaking Ground, evokes a symbolic emergence from silence to initiate dialogue. It also marks the re-rooted presence and renewed articulation of Indigenous voices within contemporary contexts. The ten participating artists and artist groups approach their work through an Indigenous perspective and distinct temporal sensibility, with a particular emphasis on relationships with ancestral spirits and the natural environment, as well as urgent issues around Indigenous rights and land justice, while engaging in broader conversations around coloniality/Indigeneity, gender, identity, and belief.

Featured works include Ali Istanda’s After the Flood, There Are Islands, which uses mythology to reflect on life philosophies shaped by the relationships between people, islands, and the ocean. The work won first prize at the 2024 Kaohsiung Award from the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts.

Aluaiy Kaumakan’s Sprouting Series 1 speaks to land, nature, and the environment. Reflecting on the changes her community faced after the 2009 typhoon and subsequent collective relocation, Aluaiy examines how they adapted to a new world, from the land they rely on, to their ways of thinking and living.

Chang En-Man extends her project, Snail Paradise Trilogy: Setting Sail or Closing Chapter in collaboration with Native American artist Jazmin Novak to present Snail Paradise Concerto - Chapter of Santa Fe. The work reflects on the dissolving relationship between Taiwan’s native species of the paper mulberry and snail mucus as a means of tracing the routes of species dispersion and human migration.

Ciwas Tahos’s work Finding Pathways to Temahahoi blends intangible cultural heritage with contemporary practice to address ideas of identity, community and belonging, in a hybrid installation piece. Idas Losin’s A Tribute to Gauguin? Is a series that engages Paul Gauguin’s work in a visual dialogue. The series includes four portraits of men in their physical prime from the Tao (Yami) people of Lanyu and the Pangcah people of eastern Taiwan, along with women with facial tattoos inspired by pan-Indigenous traditions.

Iyo Kacaw’s site-specific project A Mountain Returning to the Ocean expresses how humanity grows through repeated disasters, and learns through each rebirth to coexist in harmony with nature. Labay Eyong and Director Tomasso Muzzi’s Dungku Asang unpacks a silent dialogue among contemporary weavers, the mountains, and the quarry. In the work, Miss Kong-Rey, Labay blends emotions of fear and anxiety with a sense of submission to nature.

Makotaay Eco Art Village’s installation features works by previously participating artists from the Artist’s Camp program at the village. The installation includes content such as the 2011 “Close Off Our Land” Movement (related to the Pangcah people’s land rights in Shitiping), the Makotaay Annual Film documenting the Artist’s Camp program, and a chronology of major events for the land and the establishment of the Art Village. Mayaw Biho’s works: Shout Our Names Aloud, What‘s your “real” name, and An Identity Card That Is Worse Than a Motorbike License Plate, examine the history of naming rights being stripped away, and the role of names in affirming Indigenous identity and cultural connection. Rngrang Hungul’s I'm a Woman, I’m a Hunter depicts her mother who defied the Truku traditional taboo against women from entering hunting grounds as hunters, and how she passed on embodied ecological knowledge from her hunting experiences to her daughter. Animal Paradise simulates animals’ perspective, revealing their movement through the forest and reflecting the Truku people’s observations and use of animal trails and traps.

This exhibition is a joint effort between Taiwanese and American art institutions, highlighting the cultural resilience and proactiveness of Taiwan’s Indigenous artists in the confronting colonial histories and contemporary challenges. It reflects on the profound dialogues that Indigenous artistic practices can generate within global contexts. The exhibition invites audiences to engage with the perspectives and voices of Indigenous communities in Taiwan, and to consider how art can become a force that connects land, memory, and hope in turbulent times.