July 23rd, 2017 Chen Guan-Jhang x Okui Lala (Malaysia)
Okui Lala from Penang, Malaysia is visiting Taiwan this time for No Man’s Land Residency and Nusantara Archive Project. She has already visited several exhibitions and events in Taipei and has conducted research on Southeast Asian language courses run in Taiwan. Absolute Space for the Arts is extremely horned to invite her to visit Chiayi and Tainan and to take part in this dialogue with Chen Guan-Jhang, an artist based in southern Taiwan. Both of them are highly interested in and have done extensive studies on linguistics and multiethnic social issues. Chen Guan-Jhang has taken Okui Lala to the Siraya Community where he has being doing his field research. In this talk, they would discuss about their latest creative projects and share their insights with the audience.
Chen Guan-Jhang
Artist and cultural worker, Chen Guan-Jhang is currently a student of doctoral program in art creation and theory of Tainan National University of the Arts. He is interested in narratives and interpretations of regional memories. Through collaborations with ancestral spirits, tribal psychics, craftsmen, and linguists, he has been engaged in cultural studies on foothill settlements and has collected lost sounds and uchronia. Chen’s work combines archives, images, installations to present thoughts and practices of cultural investigation after long period of exploration of the Siraya culture, religions and beliefs of mountain-side settlements.
Why the Siraya Tribe?
Chen Guan-Jhang: I began researching on the Siraya tribe while studying at Tainan National University of the Arts. I knew that there was a group of people living near the school who shared the same language but had very different cultures and beliefs. I then realized that I was quite unfamiliar with my own surrounding environment and its history, so I began to learn the Siraya culture in order to write and document Siraya people’s lifestyle.
The main track of my field research follows the County Highway Route 168, which connects Chiayi and Tainan National University of the Arts. One could easily get sidetracked while moving between Chiayi and the university, because there are many delicious foods along the way, such as lotus route tea and popsicles in Baihe, meatballs in Dongshan. Therefore, it would always take longer than expected to reach my intended destination. I see lots of similarities between flavors of foods and linguistic accents since the types of foods would also accentuate notable features of the region.
I rely on the names of the places for the research on regional geography, especially the unique ones, such as Mad Dog House, Little Leg, Big Leg. These names tend to reveal a thing or two about the region, but to understand them accurately would require research on documents. For example, Little Leg and Big Leg are in fact translated from the Siraya tribal language, implying the confluence of two two rivers. It was mistakenly noted in a Qing dynasty record that people felt fatigued by the time they reached this area and took a break to massage the sore muscles on their legs.
Okui Lala: I find names as Little Leg and Big Leg with such impression of vivid farm village. They make me associate the image of one stepping into rice paddies with his or her pants rolled up. The shallow could refer to Little Leg, and the deeper water zone could refer to Big Leg.
Chen Guan-Jhang: I actually do not have a specific method of conducting field research. I start by chatting with the locals, and after a certain period of time, they would invite me to their events and rituals. On the other hand, I guess I just started having the curiosity and the intention to learn more. I did not realize that I was quite unfamiliar with many things until graduate school. Since then, I aspired to understand more and then to have conversations and interactions with those around. For example, when I went to buy goji berry tea, I would inquire what part of goji was selected to brew the tea, and after a while, we started to interact with each other more.
Multilingual Difficulties and Self-Identity
Okui Lala: I have made an artwork that involved four versions of me conducting group discussions. It symbolized the four languages generally spoken by Malaysians (Mandarin Chinese, Malay, English, and Hokkien). It seems impressive that one is able to speak four languages to most people, but this multilingual environment is actually quite perplexing to me. I seem to project a different image while speaking different languages. I was told that when I spoke English, I would look confidently at the camera, but looked down at the floor while speaking Mandarin. When speaking Hokkien, perhaps not fully understanding what I was saying, I would look up towards the sky.
Malay and English are the national languages of Malaysia. I used to speak in my mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese, prior to middle school. After attending university in Kuala Lumpur, and I mainly communicated in English instead, because there were many foreign students in the school. I often find myself switching between languages in different situations as well. For example, I would chat with my friends in Mandarin, write and think in English, and speak to government officials in Malay. When I am back in Penang, I would speak in Hokkien with other Chinese descent. I switch between these four languages depending on who I am talking to, and it causes a sense of imbalance to me.
Chen Guan-Jhang: I feel that there is a similar condition in Taiwan, but I realized it from pornography. Once, I went to a second-hand bookstore in Zuoying with Ni Xiang and there was a small door by the bookstore where people going in and out. Ni and I went in and saw a pornographic video storage room. There were all kinds of different videos, and I saw one spoken in Taiwanese Hokkien with Chinese subtitles. I was intrigued and bought it. However, I did not feel aroused by the video, and when the actors were describing sexual organs or talking dirty, I just felt like they were cursing. I had no desire the entire time. On the contrary, I found the whole situation very ridiculous. Mandarin Chinese is the dominant language in Taiwan, but instead, Taiwanese is my mother tongue. I was shocked that there was such great detachment between my mother tongue and the desire. Furthermore, I find it hard to express my emotions or talk about philosophy and contemporary art in my mother tongue. I would really like to try discussing about contemporary art in Taiwanese Hokkien.
Indigenous and Hakka languages in Taiwan also face similar predicaments. Are there any pornographic videos spoken in indigenous or Hakka languages? How could these videos be shot? I did a research with help from two scholars. One is a professor who tought Japanese language in university and had translated adult videos. I prepared a lot of pornographic videos and asked him to do simultaneous interpreting. I asked him about the process, and he told me that he had once worked for two days straight to translate the videos and terribly throwing up after the work being done. I could hardly imagine how he was feeling, but I also found it interesting that while translating, he might be get in touch of something that was originally detached.
Okui Lala: I took Taiwanese Hokkien courses when I was in residency program here in Taiwan, and I was deeply moved. It was my first time approaching a dialect literally and systematically. Some people say that Hokkien and Teochew dialect would disappear in Malaysia in the next forty or fifty years, because the new generation all speak to the children in English; theherfore, dialects are often neglected.
I once did an interview about languages with Japanese while staying in Japan, with the following simple question asked, “What was the first Japanese word you learned?” Many people told me it would be “sorry” or “excuse me”. I also find Taiwanese people share the same tendency. In Malaysia, we do not say “sorry” that often. the way languages are learned also implies cultural differences. I also interviewed several Filipino students that were in Japan and asked them what is the most useful phrase in Japanese, and they all said it’s the phrase, “I’m exhausted.” I was quite surprised, and then I learned that when someone says “I am exhausted” in Japanese, the person he or she is speaking to would usually respond by saying, “ya, so exhausted,” and then the two would try to encourage each other by saying, “Let’s try to do our best!”
Chen Guan-Jhang: Perhaps it is a stereotype that I have but from my perspective as a Taiwanese person, I see Japanese’s social traits reflected in this kind of language pattern .
Cultural Hybridity
Chen Guan-Jhang: Religion has also been known to adapt to local cultures. For example, there are cases with Malaysian migrant workers bringing deities from their hometowns to be housed in Han Chinese temples, and after they’ve made some money, they would bring the gods back home. Similarly in Taiwan, there is a catholic church in Yanshuei, Tainan that has a colored mural of The Last Supper that depicts Han Chinese people in traditional Chinese garments eating steamed meat buns. There is another catholic church in southern Taiwan that joins in local religious pilgrimage, so you will see the Blessed Virgin Mary in parades with Taoist folk deity, The Third Prince (三太子), and divine emissaries, Wang Yeh (王爺).
Siraya culture has become amalgamated with Han Chinese culture in contemporary times, such as the use of incense for worship and also the incorporation of celestial soldiers (兵將) in its the religious system. I don’t think it’s necessary to purposely distinguish what is “pure” and “orthodox” Siraya culture. Cultural hybridity, the fusion of two cultures, could lead to the manifestation of a new culture. I deal with cultural and ethnical issues through the perspective of art; I use art as an outlet for conceptual practice and a way to think. Methodologies used in the past utilized field research to learn about a specific place. My focus now is to try to make breakthroughs in existing methods. Field research reports in the past tend to be done in paper format. I try to present my reports using different formats, such as through video, installation, or even in the form of a culinary dish.
Okui Lala: I’ve created a video on migrant workers. Based on questions I’ve received from the audience, I then connected it to current social conditions, and through the process, I realized that the artwork is linked to issues of illegal migrant workers. The video shows how to make a Burmese salad. The salad should only take two minutes to make, but because we needed to translate the Burmese language into Malay and English, so the video ended up being three times longer than that.
A few years later I got back in touch with that group of migrant workers and expressed my wish to continue to document them. They told me that, “Did you know that there are 8 streets in Penang that are named in Burmese?” Penang and Burma were both British colonies; therefore, many Burmese people had settled in Penang. There are documents written in English on the history with the naming of those streets. I then worked with those migrant workers in translating those documents into Burmese. This translation process was quite symbolic and important to me.
