Map, Route, Trail: From Chang En-Man’s Snail Paradise to redraw culture-ecological imagination
Translated by Jo Ying Peng
Coming in sight of a cross-totem tattoo on artist Chang En-Man’s left arm, it is made by Dion Kaszas, a Native American tattoo artist, using a special technique of skin stitch. This unique traditional tattoo technique originally stemmed from the Pacific coast indigenous peoples in North America (especially the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and Alaska). Use a needle and ink thread to pierce the skin surface, then the pattern left after the thread is removed. The visual effect is as sewing a tattoo on the skin. In ancient traditions, whale bones and antlers were used as stitching tools implying that piercing one species through another, a ritual body engineering.
However, we can regard this special tattoo and body imprint as the artist’s life/biological mapping act. While Chang traveled around halfway of the globe reaching Salmon Arm in British Columbia, Canada, she has passed through geographically and physiologically by stitching the tribe’s most common cross totem on her body. During this research journey, in addition to completing her solo exhibition at Center A (As Heavy As A Feather, 2016), Chang attempted to unfold more issues related to the survival of Taiwan aborigines, the discussion regarding traditional territories, and the indigenous land justice movements in North American (including the Anti Coastal GasLink Movement). This personal mapping engineering is to some degree corresponding to circumstances of different scopes, scales, and definitions. Throughout physical, material, and territorial to ethnic and cultural boundaries, the show proposed to suture certain fragments or wounds.
Throughout extending the act of tattoo/embroidery to Snail Paradise, the overall context of “route mapping” is revealed by the artist.
In the series Snail Paradise, Chang En-Man aims to knit a route of two different species (non-human). The propagation path of the first protagonist, the Giant African Snail (the scientific name: Achatina fulica), and its place of origin can be traced back to Kenya and Tanzania. Approximately in 1800 AD, it spread from East Africa or Madagascar to Mauritius. It gradually spread to Seychelles, French Reunion, Calcutta, and North Bengal in the next century and continuously moved toward the east across the Indian Ocean. Between 1911 and 1920 it arrived in Singapore, which became the spreading center of the Giant African snail in Southeast Asia. Until the late 1920s and 1930s, it spread to North Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Hanoi and Hong Kong, and was bred and disseminated massively for duck feed. The rapid propagation caused serious ecological problems after the 1930s, and was culled vastly later. Undoubtedly the expansion and occupation of the Japanese Empire played a key force in the following process: In 1932 (Showa 7), Shimojo Kumaichi (1891-?), a medical doctor of infectious diseases and a professor at Taipei Imperial University (now National Taiwan University), introduced the Giant African Snail to Taiwan from Singapore for the purpose of food and its commercial potential. Due to the failures of management and finance, the Giant African Snail, as an exotic species, damaged local ecological balance and agriculture. However, it was widely used as a food ingredient.[1]
[1] According to Albert R. Mead, The Giant African Snail: A Problem in Economic Malacology, The University of Chicago Press, 1961
The second protagonist is Paper Mulberry, the common Moraceae in Taiwan. From fruits to roots, forage to medicinal value, are all applicable for artificial use. Here the operation in contrast is that the dense fluff of the leaves happen to be a handy tool to remove the snail slime while preparing food. This is different from the common usage as beating it into barkcloth by the Austronesians.
The Austronesian nautical network behind the paper mulberry is demonstrated in the research of the genome sequence from professor Kuo-fang Chung and his team. By tracking the paper mulberry species with the gene haplotype CP-17 and using molecular markers, they prove that the majority of the Pacific Broussonetia papyrifera is the female phase that reproduces asexually by root sprouts. It tells the differentiation from Taiwan paper mulberry that spreads and multiplies by flowering pollinated seeds. As a significant substance, the paper mulberry was hand-carried by the Austronesian ancestors across the Pacific islands. Afterward, it spreads to Sulawesi in Indonesia, Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, Rapa Nui(Easter Island), and Hawaii.[1]
[1] According to The Great Paper Mulberry: Anthropological journey of a botanist (Open Museum), Plant DNA Actually Records History! The Paper Mulberry Tells Migration History of Austronesian (Popular Science Media of Academia Sinica: Research.Sinica), What does folklore plants say about “out of Taiwan”? Taiwan is the hometown of Pacific paper mulberry (Kuo-Fang Chung)
Taking the two species of snail and paper mulberry as the guide, it pointed out the juxtaposition of two migrant tracks during the age of discovery in marine times. It is not merely to propose a naturalistic pastoral scene of the multi-species encounter, but to unveil the nature involved behind it which is a re-excavating reflection of “coloniality” that has been embedded for a long time, spanning regions, times, regimes, and bodies.
The proliferation of the Giant African snail has been following the trace of colonialism and the dualistic concept of nature categorization behind it. Following the biological science method as a pioneer of European colonialism in early-stage, biologists introduced the Giant African snail to the Indian Ocean. It thus enabled colonialism closely integrating biological science with resource exploitation.
Tracing that trail of sticky drag, it can be found not only in the cross-regional path but also in the interior land in Taiwan, somehow with an alike attitude. Through the depicted path from Chang En-Man’s work 414km of Highway No. 9, the giant snail appeared on the local development progress and had become the free protein supply for the Paiwan tribe. However, this path can also be embodied as a certain land gap that has been cut and dug to reveal the survival issues of the Paiwan ethnic group in terms of living conditions, environmental destruction, and cultural conflicts. Crawling along the savage footpath, the snail comes to be a body image that has transformed from abjection to rebirth.
The concept of “route mapping” through Chang En-Man’s practice is also represented by the collection and creation of cross-stitch patterns. An imagination and depiction of cultural-ecological system is carried out with sewing.
In Snail Paradise: Preface (2019) exhibited in TKG+, the aboriginal male trousers from the Pacavalj tribe were used as a carrier for the artist’s rewritten history. Chang adopted the non-hierarchical common floral pattern from the Paiwan cross-stitch — Compared with aristocratic patterns such as the totem of the hundred-pacer snake(deinagkistrodon), the usage of existing floral patterns allows the artist incorporating the image from personal perspectives[1] — Part of the design is integrated with the herb ingredients of snail dish: shell ginger, wild chrysanthemum, millet, and miscanthus, etc. The other part is combined with historical symbolic images: two individual suns – Blue Sky with a White Sun and Hinomaru. It implies the history of the two regimes.
[1] The cross-stitch that is commonly used by the Paiwan tribe and other Taiwanese aborigines is said to have been introduced to Taiwan by the Dutch in the 17th century. The Silaya and Dawulong tribes of the Pingpu are the most influenced. The relevant clues can be compared to the similarity of the patterns and stitches between the two tribes.
In the 2019 Singapore Biennale, Snail Paradise retraces the route by stitching up “a scene of cuisine”. Food as a method of aggregation. Besides, through cooking, it allows the work entering the shortcut of the relationship between culture and environment, the ecological clues of natural, and the long-term evolution between anthropology and ecology that depending, adapting and altering in between. A negotiation among species.
Although Singapore was once the distribution of the Giant African snail, there is no longer any dishes or recipes using snails as ingredients locally. Chang thus collaborated with two Singaporean artists ila and Kin Chui for a new recipe under the topic of “How to make a snail food?” Similar to the snail cuisines in Taiwan that are used as an exotic ingredient in many traditional dishes, these recipes have traditional Malaysia–Singapore cuisines adopt snail ingredients. The idea of the cross-stitch totem as foodscape began from the Taiwanese herbs, then it has added up buah keluak, tamarind, butterfly pea, and mountain paulownia, etc. Chang tried to expand the mapping of route and pedigree in edible herb to construct engineering of the multi-species ethnographic atlas.
