Chang En Man

Born 1967, Taitung, Taiwan 

Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan 

The Future is the Past, the Path to the Ancestral Spirits 2026 

cotton thread embroidery on paper mulberry bark, motor 

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Sydney 

Courtesy of the artist 

Language is central to how Chang En-Man reconciles the distance between contemporary urban life in Taiwan and her Paiwan Indigenous culture. Borrowing from the healing traditions of Paiwan’s shamanic tradition, The Future is the Past, The Path to the Ancestral Spirits features nine foundational Paiwan scriptures embroidered on the bark of the native paper mulberry tree. 

The Paiwan term for ‘the future is the past’, nutjaivililj, reflects the sentiment also found in the language of the Amis, another of the 16 recognised Taiwanese Indigenous peoples. The Amis refer to the paper mulberry tree as lolang, derived from the root word ‘lolol’, which signifies restoration, return and transformation. Using a language that is simultaneously native and unfamiliar to the artist, Chang’s needlework symbolically mends the rupture between herself and her ‘mother culture’. This doubling quality, emphasised by the work’s unending mobius strip construction, reflects the Paiwan people’s cosmological understanding of the cyclical nature of life, as well as the artist’s own journey back, then onward, to self.