In elaborating the exhibition, I was inspired by the animated movie The Abandoned Deity (Kao 2019). The film features a Tudigong (the god of earth) statue that was sold by the father of the child protagonist during the gambling era in Taiwan (the end of the 1980s), when a fever for the National Lottery prompted people to ask the winning numbers to gods and, whether the attempt was unsuccessful, get rid of them. The story is narrated from the statue’s point of view: the VR movie allows the audience to embody the statue and see the human contradictions and stories that lead to its sale to a gambler. Embodying Tudigong prompts the audience to suspend their judgement and to understand the controversial historical event as a complex intertwining of social and individual factors.
*Click on the first image to open the photo gallery and read the captions.
“Traces of Guanyin”, accordingly, maintains this multiplicity of voices, stories, and entanglements in approaching Chinese folk religious statues collected in European museums and among the Taiwanese second-hand market, as well as sheltered in temples. In considering traces as both material remains and narrative trajectories, the exhibition utilises heterogeneous creative media—scrapbooking, drawings, photographs, and creative writing—that are both records of research stages and voices of the different actors involved. Creative writing substantiates what the god statues could tell the audience, as if they whispered in a dream or in the night, in the museum’s storage rooms. Photos trace the chronological unfolding of the research’s quest, whereas scrapbooking captures the reflections I developed during fieldwork. Drawings are included in my scrapbook and are part of the meta-narrative discourse of the exhibition, which summarises, explains, and connects the different sections of the exhibition.
Drawings were necessary for the design of this exhibition. I already resorted to drawings during my fieldwork experience, as a way to thoroughly understand certain artistic styles or techniques of artisans I observed, or, conversely, to clarify a concept or question with fieldwork interlocutors. The latter also used drawings to elucidate their thoughts in our conversations. With this exhibition, however, it is the first time I have used drawings as an alternative way of displaying taboo topics and artefacts.
On the one hand, drawing myself within the scrapbook’s page showed my sense of awkwardness in navigating a taboo topic that could prevent or challenge any observation or conversation in the field. Rather than being an omniscient intellectual — as missionaries and ethnographers usually portrayed themselves in the 20th century — I was a clumsy foreign researcher.
On the other hand, drawings could fill the gap left by images. I mainly heard stories and testimonies, but only occasionally assisted in rituals of deconsecration due to their private and taboo dimension. Drawings also respected the privacy of specific fieldwork interlocutors, avoiding direct portrayals.
A last but not least critical remark is that the exhibit’s scrapbook is an alter-ego of my fieldnotes and, therefore, named “Fieldnotes”. In the scrapbook, I both quoted and re-elaborated on my fieldnotes, trying to reconstruct the development of events whilst maintaining a logical thread. This narrative is never unequivocal but intersects with those of my friend, Chang Yuhua, and the artist Peng Hung-Chih.
In conclusion, what the audience will see in this exhibition is not an overarching description of “how Chinese folk believers” deconsecrate their god statues and treat their afterlives, but instead how the three curators of the exhibition experienced this topic as part of their field research (ethnographic or artistic). I do hope that the exhibition will spark interest in sharing other voices and experiences on the topic.
