Siki Sufin & Alvaro Trugeda

Siki Sufin

Siki was born and raised in Dulan Village. After graduating from the National Taitung Junior College, he followed his father and brothers working on construction projects in the urban areas. During the mid-1990s, he decided to return to the village in search of his cultural roots and has been creating wood sculptures. Besides running an art studio to create sculptures, and installations and teach wood carving, he is also an important singer who passes on the legacy of the traditional Amis folk songs. He also founded the “Dulan Mountain Theater Company” to transform the living culture and traditional rituals in the village into a unique theatric performance. His creative style is closely related to the various forms of Amis’s cultural embodiment including ethnic myth, oceanic culture, and ceremonial dancing and singing. With a simple and unpretentious sense of humor, his artistic vocabulary does a better job of capturing and transmitting the essence of the oceanic cultural message than the Chinese language.

While interviewing village elders over the past decade, he learned about the indigenous military group, Takasago Volunteer Corps, and the Taiwanese Veterans; both had long been forgotten by the society and villagers. Inspired by their stories, he produced a series of works in sculpture, installation, documentary, and theatric performance. Siki is an Amis artist whose body and soul are deeply rooted in the local village.

 

Alvaro Trugeda 

Born in Santander, Spain in 1979, Alvaro Trugeda graduated from the School of Fine Arts, Salamanca University in Spain. His works have been collected by the Bank of Spain and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing. From the northernmost part of Spain, he migrated to the United Kingdom, Beijing, China, and finally came to the coast of Taitung, Taiwan, to explore his creative possibilities and search for the inner dimension more extensively. He continuously chooses paintings and sculptures as his main creative outlet. The human body, plants, and organic shapes and forms are some common elements he uses frequently. With an experimental vision, he created a strange and unique ambiance. He is also a singer and guitarist whose lineage is traced back to the old soul of Andalusia, specializing in making musical instruments from waste materials collected at the beach.

Maro’ay ko kelah／潮水坐下來了 The Tide is sitting down

Jiamuzi Bay

Driftwood, Rattan, Bamboo

Total Height 380 x Width 230, Chair Height 180 cm

There are always many words and expressions related to the sea in Oceanic culture. The Amis speaker said “Maro’ay ko kelah,” Maro’ay means to sit down and kelah means low tide, so the tide has sat down means the tide is at its lowest point, and it’s the best time to go to the beach. Amis artist Siki and Spanish artist Alvaro made a giant chair with an anthropomorphic image and a face for emotional expression. It even comes with a trident that belongs to Poseidon, the Western God of the Sea. The representation of the chair will allow us to feel the ocean’s changes and moods, just like humans deeply feel how small we are when we encounter the vastness of the ocean. The choice of the figurative chair and its practical functionality also becomes our form to express our artistic concept and challenge the issue of the so-called dichotomy between craft and art.

Siki Sufin

Alvaro Trugeda