Aluaiy Kaumakan: Weaving after the Storm

Summary

Episode 6 follows the practice of Aluaiy Kaumakan, also known in Chinese as Wu Yuling (武玉玲), a Paiwan (排灣) textile and installation artist from southern Taiwan, and asks how weaving can become a method of cultural survival after climate disaster and forced relocation. Moving between community-based making and large-scale installation, this episode stays close to the material intelligence of lemikalik （纏繞）, a concentric-circle weaving technique that turns care, tension, and repair into form.

Set in the wake of Typhoon Morakot （台风莫拉克） in 2009 and the resettlement of mountain communities, the story traces how Aluaiy’s practice shifts from individual mastery toward collective process: weaving circles as social infrastructure, and touch-based acts of return through rubbings and traces gathered from ancestral lands. Two major installations anchor the episode, Cevulj – Path of a Family and Semasipu – Remembering Our Intimacies, each offering a different vocabulary for shelter, continuity, and mourning without closure.

Keywords

Paiwan （排灣）; Paridrayan （大社部落）; Sandimen（三地門）; Typhoon Morakot （台风莫拉克）; relocation and resettlement; lemikalik （纏繞）; semasipu; rubbings and traces; cultural infrastructure; indigenous art; shelter; kinship ecology

Key References 

Biennale of Sydney. “Aluaiy Kaumakan.” Biennale of Sydney. https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/participants/aluaiy-kaumakan/. 

Deng, Tzong-Sheng [鄧宗聖]. “After Typhoon Morakot: Creative Narratives of Paiwan Artists Etan Pavavalung and Aluaiy Kaumakan on Social Media” [莫拉克風災後：排灣族藝術家伊誕‧巴瓦瓦隆與武玉玲在社群媒體的創作論述]. 藝術評論 [Art Review], no. 47, (2024): 93-138.

Google Arts & Culture. “Semasipu – Remembering Our Intimacies.” Google Arts & Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/semasipu-%E2%80%93-remembering-our-intimacies/_QGofmnhZ8To0A. 2022.

Helsinki Biennial. “Aluaiy Kaumakan.” Helsinki Biennial. https://helsinkibiennaali.fi/en/artist/aluaiy-kaumakan/. 

Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation (原住民族文化事業基金會). “The Meanings Behind a Paiwan Girl’s Garments and Accessories.” Indigenous Sight (原視界). https://insight.ipcf.org.tw/en-US/article/666. 2022.

Liang Gallery (尊彩藝術中心). “武玉玲 (Aluaiy Kaumakan).” 尊彩藝術中心官網. https://www.lianggallery.com/portfolio-view/%E6%AD%A6%E7%8E%89%E7%8E%B2/. 

Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program (TELDAP, 數位典藏與數位學習國家型科技計畫). “Paiwan Divination Pot.” Digital Taiwan: Culture & Nature. https://culture.teldap.tw/culture/index.php?id=672&option=com_content. 

Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Park (TACP, 原住民族委員會原住民族文化發展中心). “Wu, Yu-Ling (Aluaiy Kaumakan).” The 1st Taiwan International Austronesian Art Triennial (第一屆臺灣國際奧地利亞藝術三年展). https://en-tiaat.tacp.gov.tw/%E6%AD%A6%E7%8E%89%E7%8E%B2aruwai-kaumaka/. 

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Typhoon Morakot Situation Report No. 3.” OCHA. https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/china/typhoon-morakot-situation-report-no-3. 2009.

My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang

Transcript

You are listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures. Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

In this episode, we will spend time with the practice of Aluaiy Kaumakan, a Paiwan textile and installation artist from southern Taiwan.

I want to begin with a simple image.

Imagine a circle being made, slowly, by hand.

Not the clean, perfect circle of geometry, but a circle built out of twisting and binding. Threads overlap. Fingers pull. Fabric tightens, loosens, tightens again. Small decisions accumulate: where to splice, where to hide an end, where to let a knot remain visible.

If you were standing nearby, you might notice the sound first: the soft rasp of fiber, the tiny click of wire bending, and the pause when hands stop moving, not because the work is finished, but because a memory has surfaced and needs air.

Now widen the scene. Instead of one person weaving alone, imagine a room of women sitting close enough to pass scraps from lap to lap. Some are elders, some are younger. Some learned weaving early; some are relearning what was interrupted. They talk, they laugh, they disagree, and sometimes they fall quiet together.

This is not a hobby. It is a way of staying in relation.

And in Kaumakan’s practice, it is also a way of taking climate catastrophe seriously, not only as a weather event, but as a tear in a web of kinship linking people, land, water, ancestors, and more-than-human neighbors.

Today I want to offer a close reading of her work: how a traditional Paiwan technique known as lemikalik, weaving in concentric circles, becomes a contemporary strategy for living with displacement, loss, and the difficult question of return when you cannot go back in the old way.

Kaumakan was born in 1971 in Pingtung County in southern Taiwan and is affiliated with the Paiwan Nation, from the Paridrayan community in Sandimen Township. You may also see her name written as Aruwai Kaumakan, and in Chinese as Wu Yuling (武玉玲).

She is an interdisciplinary textile sculptor and installation artist who works with wool, cotton, silk, copper, and glass beads, and who often makes large organic forms that feel simultaneously vegetal and bodily. Her installations have circulated through major international exhibitions, and, in 2018, she received First Prize in Visual Arts at Taiwan’s Pulima Art Awards, the first award dedicated to indigenous art.

Mentioning this is not about prestige. It is about the conditions under which indigenous practices are allowed to appear as contemporary art rather than as folkloric supplement.

Across contemporary art, textiles are often celebrated as a medium of care and embodied knowledge. That is true, but it can also become a shortcut, as if fiber automatically guarantees intimacy or ethics.

Kaumakan’s work refuses that assumption. Its force comes from specific Paiwan histories of land, gendered knowledge, and ritual responsibility, and from the fact that a typhoon and a relocation policy disrupted the conditions under which that knowledge circulates.

In this sense, the medium is not a theme. It is a social technology, tested under pressure.

It is also important to say that her materials do not begin as an art-world trend. In Paiwan social life, weaving is a gendered form of knowledge tied to status, responsibility, and memory.

If we say that art can be an archive, Paiwan weaving pushes that idea beyond metaphor. Knowledge is stored not only in images but in technique, in materials, and in the embodied competence of hands that remember how to make what matters.

So for Kaumakan, the stakes are clear: what does it mean to activate customary knowledge when the land that sustained it has been violently disrupted?

That disruption is not only historical. It is painfully contemporary.

In August 2009, Typhoon Morakot struck Taiwan with extraordinary rainfall, triggering catastrophic flooding and landslides that took many lives, homes, and even entire villages. A storm becomes more than weather when the ground itself begins to move, when mountainsides shear away, and when what once felt stable turns uncertain.

For indigenous mountain communities in the south, Morakot became a political turning point. After the storm, many areas were judged unsafe. Return was no longer a decision a community could make on its own. Paridrayan was among the communities affected, and many residents were relocated.

One permanent resettlement site is Rinari in Majia Township. The name is often glossed as the place where we all head to, a phrase that tries to hold hope inside necessity. Rinari also concentrates complexity: it brought together residents from multiple villages, each with its own history, and relocated everyday life away from ancestral lands and waters.

If you have never experienced forced relocation, it is easy to imagine it as a single move, a neat before and after. But relocation is an ongoing condition.

It reorganizes work, school, ritual calendars, and the small habits through which people keep a place in their bodies. It reorganizes authority too: decisions about safety, rebuilding, and access are made through state procedures that can treat indigenous attachments to land as secondary to administrative closure.

This is the context in which Kaumakan’s practice changes direction.

Before Morakot, she made work connected to Paiwan textile traditions and craft design, including pieces tied to noble regalia. After Morakot, her work pushes toward collective process and toward forms that can hold, materially and emotionally, a community that has been uprooted.

Instead of weaving as individualized mastery, she turns to weaving as gathering, as shared labor, as a slow technology of social repair.

Regeneration here does not mean restoring a village to how it was. That is not possible. The mountain has shifted. Lives have been lost. What regeneration can mean, in this context, is recomposing torn relationships: keeping a community feeling itself as a community, and keeping land and memory in the present tense.

So how does she do that, concretely? One answer is that she takes a specific technique seriously and lets its logic shape the social life around it.

The technique at the core of her work is lemikalik, a Paiwan practice of weaving in concentric circles. A concentric weaving begins from a center and grows outward, layer by layer. It demands attention to tension and balance, to how additions at the edge pull on what already exists. It makes interdependence visible. Every new piece changes the whole.

This is why her lemikalik-based forms can feel like seeds, nests, pods, or organs. They look alive because they were produced through growth rather than assembly.

They also refuse the fantasy of seamless wholeness. Joins remain. Repairs are visible. Materials carry histories. The viewer can often sense that these are not objects that want to be finished in a polished, sealed way. They want to remain in process, the way communities remain in process after a disaster.

In artist statements, lemikalik is described not only as technique but as a way of intertwining memory and sustaining connection. The circle, in other words, is not a comforting symbol. It is a method for staying with complexity: for holding multiple histories in tension without forcing closure.

From an ecofeminist perspective, lemikalik performs a relational ethic. It insists that care is not an emotion; it is practice. Care is repetition, patience, and the willingness to keep working with damaged material rather than discarding it.

If repair is visible, it is not because something failed. It is because continuity requires work.

That ethic is reinforced by her material choices. She often incorporates salvaged cloth, old clothing, and industrial elements like copper wire. These materials have already belonged to someone. They have moved through worlds of labor and intimacy. When woven into new forms, the work does not erase the past. It composes with it.

In this sense, the installations are not only about place. They are also about circulation: what was carried out of the mountains, what could be saved, what could not, and what kinds of new containers become necessary.

And because lemikalik is slow, it changes the tempo of attention. In a media world where disaster appears as quick, consumable images, this practice insists on duration. You cannot rush the making, and therefore you cannot rush the remembering. Slowness becomes a disciplined refusal of erasure.

At this point, we need to broaden our definition of what counts as the artwork. For Kaumakan, the workshop is not just preparation. It is part of the practice.

After relocation, she initiated communal weaving projects that bring together women from her community. These are not simply training sessions. They are occasions where elders and younger women sit together; where stories can be shared; where knowledge can move across generations; where grief can be held without becoming spectacle.

In a resettlement site, this kind of gathering can be one of the few reliable spaces where people feel they can speak without being managed by outside institutions.

Displacement produces a particular kind of social fracture. People are separated from land, but also from the everyday rhythms that let knowledge circulate: farming cycles, paths walked together, predictable encounters that quietly hold a community in place.

Even when people live in the same resettlement site, the social geometry changes: time is redistributed, fatigue accumulates differently, conflicts sharpen, and some people stop speaking because the conditions of listening have shifted.

A weaving circle cannot repair all of that. But it can create a repeatable situation where people return to one another. It can become a small institution, a recurring gathering that builds trust through steady practice. It functions as infrastructure.

We usually think of infrastructure as roads, pipes, and power lines. But social life has infrastructures too: routines, meeting places, shared tasks that make collective action possible. In many socially engaged art projects, the most important outcome is not a final object but an expanded capacity: skills, relationships, confidence, and habits of cooperation.

Kaumakan’s weaving circles activate women’s knowledge that has long been central in Paiwan life, while responding to contemporary conditions shaped by disaster governance and resettlement policy. This is where her work becomes quietly political.

In resettlement contexts, the state often prefers narratives of closure: the disaster happened, reconstruction happened, life returns to normal. Art, tourism, and cultural display can be folded into that story as proof that things are fine.

But weaving, as Kaumakan practices it, resists closure. The work keeps rupture present. It insists that loss and displacement are ongoing, and that repair is active, collective labor.

Sooner or later, the question of return becomes unavoidable. What does it mean to return to an ancestral village that you are not allowed to inhabit, or that is physically altered beyond recognition?

Kaumakan’s answer is neither romantic pilgrimage nor documentary distance. It is touch.

For works connected to Semasipu – Remembering Our Intimacies, she returned to Paridrayan to collect cultural belongings and to print on silk through a rubbing process. Rubbing transfers a surface into a trace. It does not claim the whole, but it insists that contact matters.

This is an ethical choice. A photograph can be taken quickly and from a distance. A rubbing requires proximity and time. It requires a willingness to be slowed by stone, by texture, by unevenness. It is an archive made through embodied vulnerability. Your hand has to follow what the surface offers.

When those traces enter an installation, visitors are not simply told about loss. They move alongside a record of contact. Environmental thinking begins at the scale of skin.

Now consider one of her most recognized large-scale installations: Cevulj – Path of a Family.

Different institutions describe this work in slightly different ways, partly because it has been shown in multiple contexts. But several elements recur.

The title includes cevulj, which in Paiwan ritual contexts refers to smoke used to transmit messages between the human and spirit world, including ceremonies connected to blessing and continuity of life. Smoke disperses, but it carries scent and trace. In a relocation context, it becomes a way to think about how memory and spirit travel when a community is dispersed.

The work incorporates fiber and elements such as mud-dyed cloth, charcoal, and ash, alongside rubbings and paintings made from contact with the old village site: stone walls, plant traces, the stubborn marks of what remains.

Charcoal and ash record burning and aftermath. They also suggest transformation: what is left can stain, nourish, and enter another cycle.

Kaumakan has described seeing a plant sprouting through a crack in a stone wall at the old site, a small image of life persisting even when human residency is interrupted. It is not a heroic image. It is a stubborn one, and it refuses the fantasy that survival must look like victory.

When installed, Cevulj often becomes an enveloping, nest-like structure composed of many woven units. It functions less as monument than as shelter. It surrounds rather than stands at a distance. It asks for slower movement and steadier breathing.

It is a reminder that in many indigenous worlds, a meaningful space is not primarily something you look at. It is something that holds you while you learn how to stay.

This matters because indigenous textiles are often pulled into an ethnographic gaze, where viewers search for comfort or authenticity. Kaumakan’s forms refuse that ease. They carry rupture inside their beauty. They do not invite admiration of resilience from a safe distance.

They ask what it feels like to need shelter, to need continuity, to need a place where grief can be held without becoming a spectacle.

The phrase Path of a Family matters too. This is not only an environmental story. It is a kinship story. It traces the migration route from mountain to resettlement as something lived through feet, fatigue, leaving, and the strange disorientation of arriving somewhere new.

By making that path into a structure that can be encountered, Kaumakan turns installation into a walk-in archive. In doing so, she expands what cultural heritage can be. Heritage is not only an object behind glass. It is a set of relations that must be continually reactivated, especially under conditions of disturbance.

This is also why her work resonates internationally. But international circulation brings a real risk. It can amplify indigenous voices, and it can also flatten them into a generalized story of nature, spirituality, and resilience.

It can encourage viewers to treat indigeneity as a feeling rather than as a set of land-based rights and lived obligations.

Kaumakan’s work pushes back by insisting on specificity: specific techniques, specific names, specific ritual meanings, specific histories of relocation. The circle is not abstract. The materials are not chosen for texture. They carry place.

With that in mind, return with me to Semasipu – Remembering Our Intimacies, commissioned for the Biennale of Sydney.

The project is described as drawing on semasipu, an ability of soothing and guiding often associated with elder women, and the emergence of the river in the deepest mountain. It also references dredredan, a valuable ancestral Paiwan earthenware pot, reimagined in woven form.

Even if these terms are unfamiliar, we can hear the structure: water, vessel, and care.

Certain ancestral Paiwan pots are tied to origin stories and ceremonial and kinship obligations. Translating dredredan into textile is not simply a change of medium. It is a way of carrying an ancestral vessel forward when place-based continuity has been interrupted.

It is also a clear-eyed acknowledgment that when you cannot fully return, you still have to find material ways to hold what matters.

Water, too, must be held in contradiction. After a typhoon and landslides, water can be terrifying. It also remains a condition of life. Keeping both realities in view requires a practice capable of containing ambivalence, a practice that does not collapse into either fear or romantic reverence.

Semasipu, as soothing, is not sentimental. It is guidance back into relation when relation has been damaged. It is not denial. It is the work of making it possible to stay present with what happened, together.

This is where the project becomes deeply feminist, not as a label but as a structure of leadership. In dominant disaster narratives, expertise is imagined as engineering, logistics, and state planning. Those matter. But they do not answer how a community lives with grief and dislocation over time.

Kaumakan’s practice proposes that one answer lies in elder women’s capacities that are often undervalued: gathering people, holding stories, shaping an atmosphere where memory can be shared without being exploited, and keeping cultural knowledge circulating when everyday life has been rearranged.

So we can name semasipu as an ethics of the senses. It asks us to think about climate trauma not only as damage to infrastructure but as damage to touch, familiarity, and the feeling of being at home in a landscape.

And it asks what kinds of aesthetic practice can restore those sensory ties, not by returning to a fantasy of purity, but by composing with what remains.

At this point, the activism question returns. There are no protest banners in these installations, no direct policy demand. So why call this artivism?

Because artivism is not only confrontation. It is also the building of capacities that make a people harder to erase.

In indigenous contexts, the struggle is often not only for rights on paper but for continuity in practice: keeping language, ritual, and land relationships alive under pressure; teaching the next generation what a pattern means and what a vessel holds; keeping obligations to place present even when place cannot be inhabited in the same way.

Kaumakan’s weaving circles, return-based rubbings, and installations are forms of cultural action that refuse disappearance. They create spaces where Paiwan people, especially women, can reassert authority over how histories are told and how futures are imagined. That is political.

And because climate disaster catalyzed this shift, the work also reminds us that climate change does not land on an empty landscape. It lands on histories of marginalization. It intensifies existing inequalities. It forces decisions about whose homes are considered expendable and whose attachments to land are treated as obstacles to development.

By insisting that weaving can be a medium for climate witnessing and community repair, Kaumakan challenges the assumption that climate solutions are primarily technical. Her work suggests that climate survival is also cultural, and that cultural survival requires material practice, not only discourse.

Let me close with three lessons I take from Kaumakan’s practice.

First, regeneration can be domestic in scale and still be politically consequential. It can look like women sitting together, cutting up old clothing, binding it into new form, and in the process keeping a community’s sense of itself alive. If we only recognize activism when it is loud, we miss how much political work happens in quiet labor.

Second, archives do not have to be paper-based or housed in official institutions. A rubbing is an archive of touch. A woven form can be an archive of shared time. An installation can be an archive you enter with your body. These are not substitutes for land rights or policy change, but they are part of the cultural infrastructure that makes long struggles sustainable.

Third, the circle is not an ending. In lemikalik, the circle is a discipline: every addition changes the whole, and repair is not a one-time act but a continuing adjustment of tension, balance, and relation. In a disturbed environment, that is a realistic ethics.

Now, a small invitation.

After you finish listening, think of a place that shaped your sense of home and has since changed in a way you cannot reverse. Ask yourself what it would mean to return, not to reclaim the past, but to make contact: to touch a surface, to take a trace, to carry a piece of memory forward in a new form.

And then ask what practices in your own life already function like weaving. What binds people together across rupture? What helps you stay with loss without being consumed by it? What turns damaged materials into shared shelter?

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app. Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.