Goddess Tales

Living distant from one’s cultural origin, children of immigrants often learn about their cultural backgrounds through rituals and storytelling. Holidays, religious practices, funerals, familial dynamics, and oral history play an important role in shaping their identity. An example can be seen in childhood folktales, rich with visual imaginaries and intriguing characters, that often remain in one’s mind and form the early building blocks of a cultural identity. However, the moralizing or nationalistic intentions of such stories are rarely questioned, nor do children contemplate why certain practices are shared and others are forgotten or erased. Ultimately, through self directed research into the history of Asia and immigration to the West, a global history of capitalism, colonialism, and violence reveals itself.

Goddess Tales acknowledges and refuses censorship of their cultural histories by exploring how artists of East and Southeast Asian diasporas connect with their ancestral identities through their perspectives on folklore and mythology. It highlights how the artists reimagine traditions, subvert gender roles, and acknowledge colonial histories. They do so by bringing to light non-patriarchal narratives and native cultural practices that were banned, often violently, such as Korean shamanism and Filipino martial arts, which were seen as threats to colonial power.

For the artists, ritual and mythology have always had a prominent role in their practices. They are intangible cultural artifacts that can be studied from anywhere and offer a rich visual, imaginative, and performative language. Their shared interests can be seen in the use of craft, performance, and symbology, manifested through practices such as tarot reading, ceramic making, and martial arts. Rather than mimicking these practices as historical re-enactment, the artists instead create their own interpretation of them to serve their present-day needs in a diasporic context, whether that be self-preservation, veneration, healing, or mourning. They highlight these alternative practices as a means to achieve spiritual guidance and survival when existing solutions fail us. Philosopher Byung- Chul Han laments the disappearance of ritual in the present, defining ritual “as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.”¹

Returning to the act of ritual can help communities feel at home in Caroline Garcia, an artist who transforms research into embodiment, explores her Filipina-Australian identity by bridging ethno-traditional forms of knowledge with performance and digital technologies. For this exhibition, Garcia hand made a series of reimagined whips entitled Fair Warning to the Gods (2024) that are inspired by the buntot pagi weapon, a whip- like stingray tail used to fight mythical creatures, called aswangs. Stingrays appear as sacred, god-like creatures in mythologies around the world due to their unique shape and self defense mechanism and their lightweight, flexible, and abrasive skin offers an ideal material for use in Southeast Asian martial arts. Garcia’s whips incorporate traditional braiding techniques, a practice thriving in Australian animal herding, as well as paracord knitting, a technique Garcia has explored in her recent practice, stemming from her interest in what she calls “tactical aesthetics” blending survival and craft.

While researching and crafting these sculptural weapons, Garcia simultaneously learned how to utilize them by learning the martial art Latigo y Daga, which is captured via aerial drone and shown alongside the whips in the video A Supersonic Requiem (2024). This simultaneous research and embodiment offers the artist a deeper method of knowledge production, allowing her to put words into practice and physically embody her culture and foster a deeper connection to it. Through repetitive movement and practice, she embodies the ethos of Filipino war goddesses such as Mayari and Ynaguinid.

Garcia engages with martial arts and headhunting in her work as a way to express what the artist calls “postcolonial rage”. These native practices were banned during colonial periods, with headhunting functioning as a rationale for civilizing missions, and Filipino martials arts seen as a self defense practice that threatened Spanish colonial rule. By creating Filipino weaponry, practicing indigenous defense techniques, and teaching them to others through her collaboration with Chrysalis Kali Collective, the artist is committed to empowering others through self preservation and active resistance by cultivating ancestral knowledge.

Like Garcia, artist duo AYDO, made up of A young Yu and Nicholas Oh, are also interested in showing the cycle of ritual objects and natural elements through durational performance and time-based media. AYDO researches precolonial Korean folk practices and reimagines them through ceramics, installation, and video. Their cinematic, performance-based film, Melting Moon (Jar) (2024), features the female-centric practice of Korean shamanism, one of the oldest faith traditions in the world, in which the goddess plays a central role. Shamanism has been rejected to varying degrees, from illegality to social stigma, throughout Korea’s history.

The film also shows the artists engaging in traditional Korean folk wrestling called ssireum, and jesa, a ceremonial offering of food to memorialize ancestors. Objects that appear in the film are exhibited in the exhibition space, in the ceramic altar Ode to Shila (2024) and ceramic moon jar Dream of a Tiger III (2024), demonstrating that ritual objects cannot exist solely as artworks, but are directly used in ritual practices themselves. Ode to Shila features ceramic sculptures inspired by sacred artifacts from the Silla Dynasty. Tombs during this period were known for holding an extraordinary amount of symbolic objects, which suggest the belief in an afterlife that extends from one’s earthly life. The artists’ sculptures range from functional to artistic, with duck and boat vessels representing a crossing into the afterlife, and daggers and bowls for everyday practical use.

The centerpiece of the shrine, Dream of a Serpent (2024), is a bell with a snake wrapping through it. It plays an integral part of Melting Moon (Jar), with the bell itself and recurring ringing sounds featured in the video. The artists are drawn to the use of bells in shamanic traditions, which signifies the opening of portals and summoning of ancestral spirits, while snakes symbolize death and regeneration in Korean folklore.

Singaporean-Chinese-American artist Jia Sung references various mythologies across cultures as a way to interpret the world. Sung’s paintings and tapestries feature wide-ranging stories, from the Tsimshian story of Raven, to fox spirits in Chinese mythology, and tarot card reading. She finds inspiration in the trickster figure, a character not rooted to any one place—a boundary crosser.

Wound that Bears Fruit (2024) references the indigenous North American myth about a boy who dies and is reborn with no appetite, until he eats a scab and transforms into a raven who takes on different disguises in order to fulfill his new found appetite. In this story, Sung is interested in the dualities of hunger and appetite, wounds and healing. Another handwoven tapestry, Late Supper (2022), references foxes in East Asian mythology, a shapeshifter who oscillates between gender, good and evil, human and non-human. By exploring these narratives, Sung explores ways of harnessing more fluid understandings of oneself and breakthroughs in knowledge to create changed ways of seeing, a universal theme in folklore.

In other works, Sung incorporates Chinese symbols into European formats. Zodiac Man (2024) is based on medieval European medical diagrams that associated zodiac symbols with different parts of the body. Sung’s reimagining references Chinese zodiac symbols and Daoist medical diagrams. Lantern flies, an insect Native to China, flutter across the canvas, a reference metaphorizing invasive species and immigrants in their parallel abilities to flourish in a displaced context.

Trickster’s Journey (2018) comprises 22 paintings based on the major arcana deck in tarot card reading, a fortune- based exercise originating in Italy. Sung inserts Chinese cultural references in each hand-painted card, including Tang Dynasty symbols, Buddhism, and the 16th- century Chinese folk novel Journey to the West. In her interpretation, the story of the novel’s main character, Monkey King, is told in the format of the tarot deck and follows his path towards Buddhist enlightenment. Other cards in the deck highlight gender-fluid deities such as Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of mercy and the Hindu deity Ardhanarishvara which directly translates to “the lord whose half is a woman.”

Through painting, textile, sculpture, ceramics, performance, and video, Goddess Tales features a cast of characters including shamans, deities, aswangs, and animal spirits. Through the inclusion of objects alongside performative activations, the exhibition demonstrates that the objects within it are not just consumed but also used, enacted, and tactile. It showcases how each artist brings to light forgotten narratives and by doing so, builds a stronger connection to their hyphenated identities, finds alternative ways to heal, and strengthens ancestral bonds, real or imagined.

1. Byung-Chul Han. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020.

Katie Yook
Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2024