If the Mountains Disappear—Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains: Building a Mountain through Shared Stories

During a trip to an Indigenous village, queer artist Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) stopped by a local grocery store, where she overheard an elder speaking about the legend of Temahahoi—a mythical tribe of women dwelling deep in the mountains. Intrigued, she delved deeper into the tale, discovering that these mountain women could communicate with bees and even become pregnant by the wind. To Anchi, the very fabric of this legend pulsed with a profoundly queer perspective. This sparked a sense of connection and led her to launch a series of creative research projects. In 2023, Anchi met dance artist Nanako Matsumoto through the 2023 ADAM Artist Lab. This encounter blossomed into a collaborative project.

Upon hearing about Temahahoi for the first time, Nanako was reminded of Yamanba, a figure frequently appearing in Japanese children’s books—a supernatural old woman whose identity hovers between helping lost hikers and devouring travelers. Yamanba has long fascinated feminist literary scholars as a character full of contradictions. When Anchi explained that without mountains, Temahahoi would have no place to exist—and that the very legend would vanish—Nanako realized that the same would hold true for Yamanba: if the mountains disappeared, so too would she.

Thus, the seeds of artistic creation were sown. The two artists exchanged stories and began a deep and critical dialogue. Together, they reimagined these two mythical communities through new perspectives, infusing the narratives with contemporary ecological and queer concerns. They sought to rebuild their personal relationships with Temahahoi and Yamanba. They decided to create a mountain—a space that blurs geographic boundaries—where the women of these two communities might meet. Through their contemporary lens, they aimed to write a new chapter for these legends and discover fresh connections between them.
 

Based in Tokyo, dance artist Nanako Matsumoto had previously collaborated with Kengo Nishimoto from “team chiipro” to develop the concept of the "Yokai Body". Here, “Yokai” doesn’t simply denote supernatural beings but rather embodies unfamiliar emotions or individuals whose essence is transmitted through oral storytelling or visual imagery, manifesting in bodily gestures and shapes. As Nanako searched for the archetype of Yamanba, she drew upon two distinct scenes. One comes from a traditional Noh play in which a young urban dancer performs the role of Yamanba, only to encounter the true mountain witch in a shrine deep in the forest; their dance together begins with the dragging of heavy footsteps—a first movement motif. The second story comes from Japanese folklore: in a remote village, mothers who turned sixty were carried into the mountains by their sons to be abandoned. Along the way, the mother broke branches from trees overhead. When the son turned to ask why, the mother explained that she was leaving a trail so he would not lose his way home. The image of the son carrying his mother, leaning close to hear her voice, became Nanako’s second source of movement inspiration. From these two starting points, she developed a dancing body to translate the story of Yamanba.

Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos), whose previous works span performance, dynamic images, and visual art in new media, chose to center her own “voice.” She performs spoken text, primarily in English but interspersed with words in Atayal, using speech as the medium to translate and deliver the Temahahoi legend, in contrast to Nanako’s physical performance. In what at first appears to be parallel performances, the two artists weave in their personal reflections on these stories, achieving an organic complement onstage. Through this synthesis of visual and auditory experiences, audiences climb the mountain alongside them, stepping into the worlds of Yamanba and Temahahoi.

“From a human perspective, becoming pregnant by the wind seems impossible. But from the perspective of bees, it’s as natural as pollination,” Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) observed. “Just as the body of the yokai seems out of place in the human world, from Yamanba’s point of view, it makes perfect sense.” The deeper Anchi explored these two characters, the more connections she felt between them. Nanako Matsumoto, too, realized that both Yamanba and Temahahoi are products of nature—non-fictional beings. This shared understanding became a key perspective shaping their work.

At the same time, they began to examine these two through ecological and capitalist lenses. In today’s world, mountains are often treated as private property owned by governments or corporations. Against this backdrop, they wondered: How could Yamanba and Temahahoi survive? So they decided: “We’ll build a mountain—a piece of communal land belonging to no one—where these two communities can live and meet each other.”

During field research, Nanako visited “Alang sasi” in Nantou, where she joined a workshop. She watched young people craft 3D models of mountains, engaging elders in dialogue to record traditional mountain place names preserved only in memory. Meanwhile, Anchi recalled that Puli’s pure water had once made it an ideal site for paper production. During the Japanese colonial era, the government attempted to establish a washi paper factory there. Thus, a “mountain made of paper” became the starting point of their mountain-building project. Paper, as both a medium for recording stories and a metaphor for fragility, echoed the vulnerability of these women’s communities. Their paper mountain, blurring state borders and boundaries, became the vessel carrying their story onto the stage.

(Left) 3D mountain models crafted in “Alang Sasi”; (Right) Handmade paper used in the performance. (Image provided by the artists)

By coincidence—or perhaps by shared artistic intuition—both Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) and Nanako Matsumoto chose to tell their stories from the third-person perspective, using their familiar languages of body and voice rather than performing as characters in the first person. Nanako believes that maintaining distance from the character allows for a smoother, more comfortable storytelling process and leaves audiences with more room for imagination and interpretation.

For Anchi, neither Yamanba nor Temahahoi represents a single woman—they embody entire communities of women. No one person can fully speak for all women. Observing and narrating, rather than fully embodying, is how they forge connections through their art with these mythical women. She reflected: “Living under the same globalized patriarchal capitalist structure, how do we resist this condition through artistic creation?

Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains emerged as the fruit of this shared inquiry. The work was first presented in the 2024 ADAM Kitchen program and debuted at the Kyoto Experiment in October of the same year. Separated geographically between Taiwan and Japan, Anchi and Nanako communicated in their second languages, sharing ancient legends from their respective cultures. Through a contemporary lens, they wove these myths into global conversations, translating them onstage into narratives that audiences could feel and experience. This is a work impossible to define. Only by entering its world, attending closely to each detail that catches your attention, and seeking the meanings behind them, can you follow the trail of broken branches left by its creators—entering the mountain to see the story in full.