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2025/07/11

From Queer Confusion to Cross-Ethnic Alliances: The Women’s Society, the Yamanba, and Their Descendants

Taipei Arts Festival

By Lu Weilun (Curator and Art Critic)

Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art underwent a significant transformation in the 2010s. A key shift occurred as earlier approaches—centered on geographic genealogies and master-apprentice lineages—were disrupted by the intersections of different generations and artistic media. Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) is one of the notable figures of this period. Due to family circumstances, Anchi was sent to study in Canada at a young age. During this time, she was not only physically distant from Taiwan but also unaware of her Atayal maternal lineage, which had been deliberately concealed by her family. It wasn’t until a trip back to Taiwan, while relocating, that she discovered a damaged animal-bone necklace among her grandmother’s belongings—an object that would ignite her curiosity about her roots.

This story of a concealed maternal lineage not only reflects Taiwan’s broader historical suppression of Indigenous culture—where many were taught to hide their identity in a Han-dominated society—but also reveals a forgotten chapter of family history buried in the Japanese colonial era. Through her later investigations, Anchi learned that her grandmother had been separated from her original family, though the reasons remain unknown. As a result, traces of her grandmother’s life were fragmented, and no contact with her original village could be found. This severance could have been disheartening. But upon returning to Taiwan, Anchi found herself drawn to the mystery. Through a range of efforts—including her artistic practice—she began, as an adult, to construct a path toward her ethnic identity.

From Queer Confusion to a Queer Motherland

The path of this artistic practice was far from easy. As a self-identified queer woman, Anchi initially found herself out of place in Taiwan’s contemporary Indigenous art scene, which—since the 1990s—had been shaped by a strongly dominant gender-binary framework. Her early works were steeped in a sense of contradiction and confusion, reflecting an emotional state widely shared among queer Indigenous artists at the time. Moreover, her mysterious matrilineal Atayal heritage, spanning three generations, set her apart from artists of the identity politics generation. With a severed family lineage and a non-binary sense of gender, her return to Indigenous identity was neither straightforward nor typical. Yet by 2020, she began to emerge from this state of queer confusion. The dual lack—of both queerness and genealogical continuity—transformed into an active force of construction. In Atayal mythology, Anchi discovered the legend of a place inhabited only by women—Temahahoi. Though anthropologists have long struggled to interpret this widely recurring myth of a women’s land, Anchi understood it immediately upon hearing it: this was a queer memory, buried deep in ancient time and human civilization, never lost.

Since then, she has continued to search for the hidden histories of her family while also finding her spiritual homeland. Beginning in 2020, Anchi gradually constructed a mythological motherland—interwoven with classical queer texts and contemporary lesbian private narratives. Within a cloud-based virtual space she created, Temahahoi gained a physical presence, descendants, and stories. It became a point of convergence between her own life and that of her diasporic grandmother—a queer homeland claimed by contemporary Indigenous queer communities. Named through queerness and centered on gendered subjectivity, this homeland transcends the ethnic classifications imposed during the colonial era. In Anchi’s recent practice, this space has grown to include cross-ethnic female encounters and queer alliances. These cross-ethnic—and even cross-national—coalitions reanimate the mysterious lands buried in classical mythologies, once erased by men, as contemporary queer spaces: dynamic, resistant, and creative domains shaped by the agency of women.

When the Descendants of Mythical Matriarchs Meet

Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains, a collaborative work by Anchi Lin and Japanese choreographer Nanako Matsumoto for the Taipei Arts Festival, is one of the most significant pieces to emerge from such acts of alliance. Before the creative process began, the two artists had already spent considerable time immersed in each other’s textual worlds—even venturing into Taiwan’s mountainous landscapes—bringing into the work not only its original narrative elements, but also a reflective engagement with the real world and the land itself.

From Anchi’s perspective, the piece extends her creative narrative of Temahahoi, a space where women from different times and places collide to produce heterogeneous dialogues about life. Matsumoto, meanwhile, draws upon the ancient Japanese figure of the yamanba (やまうば)—the mountain witch—and expands its meaning. The body she performs with inherits both folk mythology and the traditional interpretations of Noh theater. At the same time, she subtly challenges the misogynistic narratives and patriarchal gaze embedded in those myths and theatrical histories, guided by a contemporary feminist consciousness. She performs as a dancer who specializes in “playing” the yamanba, driven by curiosity, pursuit, imitation, and imaginative projection. But in her journey, she enters the highlands of the Atayal people and encounters the women of Temahahoi. These two mythic texts—and their matrilineal descendants, long submerged in the tides of time and distorted by male fantasies and retellings—finally intersect through the cross-ethnic alliance of these two artists, opening up a richly complex dimension. Whether in the historical relationship between the two regions, the interweaving of ancient female narratives, or the ways these modern women negotiate and create in response to the worlds they’ve inherited—the moment their silhouettes prepare to take the stage marks a rewriting of boundaries.