Taiwanese poet and interdisciplinary artist Yu-Hsuan Wu has spent time learning with Pangcah Indigenous communities in Taiwan through everyday practices of chanting, rice-wine making, weaving and ritual. Carrying questions about what traces myths leave on landscapes and people, she travelled through places to which these stories are bound.
Hämärässä joku sytyttää pellon tuleen presents nine black-and-white photographs alongside Finnish poetry and short texts on place, myth and history. The exhibition traces Wu’s process of excavating myth—and of being excavated by myth in turn.
Shortly before the birth of her child, Wu dreamed of the four Chinese characters 暮落焚田. She writes: “I imagine the light fading. I step into the cold, damp earth and begin to kindle a fire. However slow and clumsy my movements may be, seen from afar, I have already held back the dusk. The flames I kindle are wilder even than dusk. Even if no one sees me. This is the life I want.”
Related event: During the exhibition, Wu leads When Myth Passes Through the Body — An Interdisciplinary Art Workshop on 3 and 10 October, 14:00–16:00. Participants choose one session. The workshop is conducted in English and explores liminal states of the body and mind through myth, image, sound and movement.
Artist: Yu-Hsuan Wu is a Taiwanese poet, interdisciplinary artist, art educator, and doctoral researcher at the University of Lapland. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in the United States, and studied Butoh at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Japan. She has undertaken artist residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute, Jane St. Art Center in New York, and La Porte Peinte in France, and has led interdisciplinary art workshops internationally. Her practice spans poetry, photography, embodied practice, and site-responsive art, exploring myth, perception, place, and the shifting relationship between the body and the world.
