tribaltextiles.info

News of what sounds like a fascinating exhibition to be staged in Taiwan at the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines which is located on Yang Ming Mountain overlooking Taipei city.

The exhibition - "Recovering Lost Woven Treasures" - will run from June 19 through August 31, 2012. It will consist of eighty six reproductions and creative interpretations of beautiful historic textiles from Taiwan’s “first peoples”, the yuanzhumin", woven and embroidered by Professor Yushan Tsai.

Yushan Tsai is an accomplished textile professional, scholar and artist with vision and a mission. The exhibition is the culmination of more than ten years of her research and textile reproduction work.

I was alerted to this upcoming exhibition by Kathleen Forance Johnson who is herself a weaver and lived in Taiwan from 1996-1999 when she met Professor Tsai, an academic at Fu Jen Catholic University in the Department of Textiles and Clothing, College of Human Ecology.

Kathleen has written a very interesting article about the exhibition which she has entitled "Taiwan Aboriginal Textiles: Translations and Transformations, An Exhibition by Yushan Tsai" Kathleen has very kindly sent me the PDF file of her article for me to attach to the forum to share with you all. As a taster I attach a few photos from the article including: Yushan Tsai modeling a beautiful costume from the Rukai indigenous group; weaving at her dobi loom; a reproduction by her of heads motif from an old Paiwan tribe textile; and her showing needle weaving a Rukai embroidery pattern on the loom.

With Kathleen's agreement I am planning to convert the PDF file to a web article as part of the 'studies, articles and exhibitions' section of the main www.tribaltextiles.info website. When it is live I will put a link into this thread.

We have already been privileged to see some of Yushan Tsai's meticulous and beautiful reproductions of yuanzhumin textile patterns on the forum e.g. See a post of mine in Nov 2009 http://www.tribaltextiles.info/communit ... =4669#4669

Reading Kathleen's preview of the upcoming exhibition only increases my admiration for Yushan's meticulous and beautiful work - and, of course, the original textiles on which her reproductions are based. If anyone has the chance to see this exhibition it certainly looks to be a treat! Meanwhile I commend Kathleen's article to you.

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Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource

Thanks Pamela for posting this information.

I just returned from a month in Taiwan and was most fortunate to meet the excellent Prof. Tsai after she attended a lecture on Borneo textiles I gave at Fu Jen. I was very kindly given a copy of Prof. Tsai's book which has the amazing charts she produced of several of the aboriginal textiles. I would give you more information on it but it, along with many other heavy books, a large wine jar and more, is enroute to my house here in the US.

I also visited the Shung Ye aboriginal museum which is across the steet and down a bit from the National Palace Museum. The Shung Ye has some excellent exhibits and is well worth attending to see them. Unfortunately, only a few other visitors were there when I was there. I don't know if that is commom but I suspect so because I don't think the Taiwan people have that much interest yet in the aboriginal peoples. I was further fortunate to be escorted through the musuem by the wife of one of my former Ph.D. students, who, when he was president of Ming Chi University, visited at length every single aboriginal tribe in Taiwan and was welcomed into their cultures. So she had some first hand information about the peoples.

But I am sorry that I will miss the exhibition.

And the National Palace Museum is practically unvisitable these days because of the very many bus loads of visitors from Mainland China who deluge it daily. If you like wall-to-wall crowds, that's the place for you.

I have some pictues and movies of an elderly woman of the Atayal people, demonstrating many of the steps in weaving on their backstrap loom starting from stripping the ramie plant stalks to produce the fibers and then turning them into threads using a drop spindle. A really lengthy and skill demanding set of steps. She complained that the girls these days don't want to spend all that effort.

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John

See also thread http://www.tribaltextiles.info/communit ... php?t=2320 which gives some insight into Tsai yu shan's work.

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Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource

I have received from Tsai yu shan a few pictures of the 'Recovering Lost Woven Treasures' exhibition which opened on 19 June and will run until 31 August 2012. It looks to be a very detailed and fascinating exhibition. I gather that yu shan used coloured dots to indicate the different tribes.

(I do like it when I receive images of an event for which I received advance notice. I may not be able to travel but I can get a flavour of it!)

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Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource

See http://www.tribaltextiles.info/communit ... php?t=2346 on the books section on this forum for a new book "Recovering Lost Woven Treasures: Translation and Transformation" published by Tsai Yushan recording 10 years of her research and exhibitions.

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Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource