Written by Su-Mei Lo
Image credit: O ‘Orip no ‘Amis. Exhibited from 2025.11.16 to 2026.03.29, Peinan Site Park, National Museum of Prehistory, Taiwan. Provided by Hot Spring Project Studio.
Collaborative exhibitions with Indigenous communities are more than a passing trend in Taiwan, as they are a transformative movement that opens vital spaces for multivocality within museums. In Taiwan, collaborations between indigenous communities and museums have a long history. One of its earliest examples dates back to 1995, when the private Shun Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines (順益台灣原住民博物館) invited indigenous scholars, cultural workers, and tribal communities to participate in “Connecting with ethnic communities” (與部落結合), a foundational series of special exhibitions. Since its opening in 2002, the National Museum of Prehistory (國立臺灣史前文化博物館) has frequently collaborated with neighbouring indigenous communities to centre local voices in the curatorial process. To address the long-standing issue of underutilised local museums in rural townships, the Council of Indigenous Peoples launched the “Big Museums Supporting Small Museums” (大館帶小館) in 2007. By leveraging the institutional expertise of major public and private museums, this programme revitalised the local exhibitions. A notable milestone was the exhibition “Kiwit Artefacts Return to Kiwit” (奇美文物回奇美), a joint effort between the National Taiwan Museum (國立臺灣博物館) and the Amis Kiwit Cultural Museum in Hualien in 2009. These collaborative exhibitions initiated entirely new modes of relational interaction between museums and indigenous communities.
In 2016, I initiated an experimental collaborative exhibition titled “Kamaro’an i ‘Atolan” (阿美族都蘭部落的土地故事與生命敘事), and I have turned this curatorial experience into a journal article, “Anthropological Practice of Participatory Curating: Friction and Trial of the Collaborative Exhibition Kamaro’an i ‘Atolan–Land Stories and Life Narratives of ‘Atolan Amis’” (Lo 2018), and a published blog writing (Lo 2018). Working alongside thirteen Amis indigenous participants from the ‘Atolan community located on the east coast, ranging in age from 17 to 90, we mapped the stories of the land and its people through biographical objects selected collaboratively by the participants and me, as the curator.
The exhibition took place during a delicate period of recovery. ‘Atolan had just emerged from a long, bitter struggle against a government-initiated development project first proposed in 2002, which was a conflict that left deep ideological fractures across different lineages and generations within the village. As an Anthropologist who has worked in ‘Atolan since 1997 and as the curator of this exhibition, I spent months negotiating with participants to ensure their stories were told against this tense sociopolitical backdrop. While land rights remained central, the exhibition expanded beyond simple protest; each participant offered a deeply personal perspective on identity, belonging, and who they long to become within their historical and socio-environmental contexts.
At that exhibition, I initially proposed inviting the indigenous community’s age organisation to participate collectively. This strategy of appealing to formal authority was initially refused; community leaders questioned whether an exhibition was a legitimate or appropriate public reason to mobilise the collective age-grade structure. Yet, as the project unfolded, the inner logic of the relations between the thirteen participants naturally aligned with this cultural order. Following careful dialogue with the representative heads and tribal community elders, this traditional hierarchy ultimately became the focal point of the exhibition’s spatial structure, dictating the inner order of the displayed object sequences. This negotiated friction became an invaluable learning experience for me as a curator at the University Museum of Anthropology, National Taiwan University (國立臺灣大學人類學博物館), sparking vital dialogues within the community and redefining my participation.
In the subsequent exhibition, O ‘Orip no ‘Amis: A Special Exhibition on Environmental and Cultural Knowledge of the ‘Amis (美式人生, with another form in digital display, here), held in 2025-2026 at the Peinan Site Park of the National Museum of Prehistory, we sought to appeal to the neglect of Indigenous knowledge and environmental education and the essentialism of indigeneity. This project mapped the vision of actors spanning from Taitung to Keelung, consciously dismantling the rigid dualism that separates ancestral hometowns from urban migrant spaces in the conventional understanding of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Instead, we brought the constant flow of people, materials, and memories directly into the exhibition space. Through photographs, short films, co-created objects, plant specimens, jewellery made from marine debris, and research tools, various collaborators offered intimate, personal interpretations of the Amis style of life. These contributors included two educational organisations: the Kasui Dancing Group (薪傳舞團) from ‘Atolan and the Indigenous Experimental Class of Badou High School from Keelung (基隆市立八斗高中原住民實驗班), alongside local and international artists such as Hana Box, Rock Ina, Mima’an/Yu-Jing Wang, Siki Sufin, Guo-tai Cheng, Sinan Jyanakem/Yin-Hua Li, Malu Yon-jie Pan, Futuru C. L. Tsai, Dongi Kacaw, Yu-Fang Huang, Sheng-li Kang, Tin-yu Chen, Li-mei Huang, I-chun Liao, Shang-lin Wu, and Soojung Yoon. The co-curator, Chien-ming Lu, designer of the space Shang-lin Wu, and I supported the intensive workshops and co-production interactions, which began in 2023 and early 2025, allowing the exhibition to serve as a time-consuming and labour-intensive process.
If I could choose some works in this exhibition that touch me the most, the documentary film I collaborated on with Yu-fang Huang and the Edible Wild Plants Working Group is certainly the one that comes to my mind first. Titled “Gardens as Metaphors, Edible Wild Plants as Humans,” this ethnographic film foregrounds three Amis women’s intimate knowledge of edible wild plants and the ways these plants mobilise people and mediate relations among them through exchange and collective memories. The Amis home gardens are a sophisticated indigenous ecological knowledge system (Lo and Hu 2022, 2023), one that does not sharply divide the cultivated from the untamed but instead emphasises relational coexistence, rhythmic attentiveness, and social exchange. In the second segment, Aunt Kikim tells us the story of her home garden. Five years ago, she began cultivating a borrowed plot from a friend. It was closer to her home, which she could visit more easily and more frequently than her plots. She took seed-sharing as a form of sociality in her narrative. Each day, she carries plastic bags filled with seeds on her motorcycle, carefully labelling each one with a friend’s name. Giving seeds, she explains, inevitably elicits reciprocal gifts, such as additional vegetables or companionship. “This is what we indigenous peoples like,” she remarks. “We share, and the generosity brings us collective joy.” Her narrative vividly demonstrates a gift economy grounded not in abstraction but in everyday sociality and affective reciprocity.
Image credit: Ten Vegetables in One Soup. By Dongi Kacaw, O ‘Orip no ‘Amis. 2025-2026. Provided by Hot Spring Project Studio.
Image credit: The Social Lives of Plants and People. Curated by Jer-Ming Hu and Su-mei Lo. O ‘Orip no ‘Amis, 2025-2026. Provided by Hot Spring Project Studio.
In the livelihoods of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, foraging in the wild is a vital survival skill, a cyclical practice of symbiosis with the environment. This practice, passed down year after year and generation after generation, has never disappeared due to modernisation or urban migration, as outsiders might assume. In their hometowns, the nationalised education forces indigenous peoples to preserve knowledge of edible wild plants and other traditional skills—which should have been learned in daily life—only during a very limited ritual period. However, in the context of urban migration, gathering, with its expanded scope and recreational activities, presents an Amis style of life that is resilient to transformation and urban adaptation.
Through Malu/Yong-jie Pan’s presentation of the Siki’s family marine knowledge and Guo-tai Cheng and Sinan Cinta’s creatively framed jewellery made of marine debris and recycled materials (please see 3-D displays 1 and 2), we are like following the traditions of this mountain-and-sea foraging on the edge of the North Coast’s urban environment, not far from Taiwan’s metropolitan centre, to discover the way of life that continues to coexist with the environment even after migrating to the cities. Here, these two works contain multiple layers of indigenous traditional ecological wisdom, combined with an urban-nomadic adventure.
Are edible wild plants biological materials or cultural artefacts? Is clothing with flower decoration a representation of family memories, a symbol of identity, or a medium of emotion? This vision of biocultural criteria provided by some objects presented in the exhibition inspires us to incorporate cultural elements, including both Amis and Latin names and edible wild plants on the poster (here), such as rabbit milkweed (datimtimay), the fruit of small bitter melon (anengelay), and flowers that border traditional female skirts. Is the distance between urban indigenous migrants and their original hometowns an obstacle to practising traditional environmental knowledge? We also hope to propose the following related perspectives for this exhibition: While indigenous environmental knowledge is based on local adaptation, their ancestors’ ability to observe the environment and their resilience in adapting have been honed over hundreds of years.
Comparison and contrast with scientific knowledge is a process, not a result, that helps us better understand this type of knowledge in the contemporary world. The specimens of edible wild plants from the Amis, provided by the Herbarium of National Taiwan University and me, as well as the botanical illustrations by Botanist Jer-Ming Hu, also echo this comparison and interactive dialogues of knowledge. For me, anthropological knowledge serves as a medium. Being an anthropologist means serving as a translator in this curatorial project. We need to understand the complex, multifaceted nature of traditional ecological knowledge by translating its biocultural idioms and forms. In today’s world of abnormal climate and significant environmental changes, the migration of indigenous knowledge and its ability to adapt to extremely marginal environments will make important contributions to human survival.
Image credit: Identity. Portraits of Indigenous Students. By Shang-ling Wu, O ‘Orip no ‘Amis. 2025-2026. Provided by Hot Spring Project Studio.
However, amidst the competition and pressures of Taiwan’s overall lifestyle, the rich environmental and cultural knowledge of indigenous communities is often misunderstood or overlooked. How can this knowledge be passed on sustainably? In this exhibition, along with the efforts in the transmission of knowledge and their stories, the two important educational groups in eastern and northern Taiwan—the Kasui Dancing Group from the indigenous region and Badou High School from the Keelung metropolitan area—lead us to reflect deeply and learn about the sustainable livelihoods of indigenous peoples from different perspectives through their practices and the resilience of the knowledge system.
Since the rise of new museology and relational curation in museum anthropology, multivocality and cooperation with source communities have become possible in exhibitions. The two examples above were conducted at the Museum of National Taiwan University and the National Museum of Prehistory, which have supported many coworking projects in the past. The trials are not easy, but they will surely be a route to connecting first-line practitioners with relational curatorship.
Su-mei Lo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Taiwan Pacific Center, National Taiwan University. She has worked extensively on environmental, ritual, and gender issues with the Indigenous Community, ‘Amis of ‘Atolan, on the southeastern coast of Taiwan since 1997. She is the author of “The Social Lives of Plants and People: Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Food Practices in Amis Home Gardens” (2022, with Jer-Ming Hu). She is currently studying the edible wild plants, revival of millet cultivation, food systems, and migrant knowledge in the contemporary ‘Amis society. In 2016-2017 and 2025-2026, she curated two collaborative exhibitions at the Museum of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, and at the Peinan Site Park of the National Museum of Prehistory.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Polyphonic Curation: Museum Exhibitions and Indigenous Dialogue.