Photography and Poetry Solo Exhibition｜暮落焚田 Hämärässä joku sytyttää pellon tuleen

 

Myth is an undercurrent beneath the present.

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Taiwanese poet Yu-Hsuan Wu has spent time learning with Pangcah Indigenous communities through chanting, rice-wine making, gathering wild greens, weaving headdresses, and participating in rituals and everyday life. She gradually came to feel that myth is not a story left behind in the past, but an undercurrent still moving beneath landscape, language, and daily life.

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Why do the Pangcah believe that divinity resides in all things? What traces have Pangcah myths left on the landscape and on the people who live there? And what new myths are being created through Pangcah life in the present? Carrying these questions with her, Wu reads Pangcah myths while travelling through the lands to which these stories are bound.

 

暮落焚田 Hämärässä joku sytyttää pellon tuleen unfolds as a process in which Wu excavates myth and is, in turn, excavated by myth. The exhibition presents nine black-and-white photographs, lines of poetry in Finnish, and short texts on place, myth, and history. The purity and cruelty of myth bring her back to the confusion, loss, calm, and joy she has experienced in her own life, while reminding her that her existence is connected to a wider human experience across time and place, allowing possible meanings of being human to surface and flow.

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One morning, shortly before the birth of her child, Wu dreamed of the four Chinese characters 暮落焚田. She writes: “I imagine the light fading. I step into the cold, damp earth and begin to kindle a fire. However slow and clumsy my movements may be, seen from afar, I have already held back the dusk. The flames I kindle are wilder even than dusk. Even if no one sees me. This is the life I want. And whatever rises from beneath the earth, I am willing to stay close to it, rising and falling with it.”

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