Ciwas
Tahos

Ciwas Tahos, also known as Anchi Lin 林安琪, works with a quiet insistence. Her practice does not announce itself loudly, yet it carries a steady pull—attentive, self-determined, and collaborative. Ciwas, who is of Atayal and Hō-ló descent from Taiwan, works across performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramic instruments, and field-based gestures in the mountains. One senses a person who listens closely before acting, as she weaves Tayal[1] worldviews into forms that breathe with movement and relation.

Ciwas’ work is body-centered, with the body functioning as a sensor, a relay point between land, language, and infrastructure. “I am interested in how the body remembers,” she notes in conversation, “and how it can learn again, or relearn.” Her artist body appears as a site under pressure—negotiating Indigenous cosmologies alongside settler histories, holding friction between inherited knowledge and the systems that have repeatedly tried to overwrite it. Trained in Taipei and Vancouver, and recently expanding her practice through artistic collaborations across the Indo-Pacific region, she moves towards Tayal ways of knowing.

This return is careful and ongoing. Only after graduating, Ciwas began learning Squliq Atayal, one of the six major Atayal dialects, following years of Mandarin-dominated schooling. Atayal language encodes an ecology of the body, whereby many terms for body parts double as environmental descriptors: hbun names both the hollow of the chest and a river confluence; kalaw refers to a rib and a mountain ridge; l’ux to a shinbone and a slope; qolu to a throat and a crossroads; punga to a navel and a cave in a rock wall. These linguistic folds articulate a relational ontology in which anatomy and territory are folded into one another, grounding one’s identity in an ever-changing sense of place.

Among the elders Ciwas learns with is Yumin Masaw from the Xikou community, who continues to share his practice of wild bee tracing—a knowledge that exists solely through embodied transmission—unwritten, unsketched, and inseparable from the mountain paths themselves. This embodied transmission feeds directly into Ciwas’ work, where tracing, attending, and sometimes covering become recurring strategies.

Bees also appear as guardians to Temahahoi—a society of tattooed women said to live hidden in the mountains, unmarked by coordinates or male presence, sustained by steam and smoke, capable of conceiving through wind, and protected by bees. By invoking “pathways to Temahahoi,” Ciwas does not imagine a queer space into being so much as trace a passage towards one that has always existed—a mode of access through which enduring relations, communities, and ways of living can be sensed, remembered, and re-entered. Her commitment to non-binary work extends beyond gender, touching Taiwan’s long-standing division between mountains and plains, Indigenous territories and settler space, oral knowledge and encoded systems—asking how such relations might be carried forward gently, in support of Indigenous and planetary futures.

Freda Fiala,
Cultural Studies scholar, specializes in Taiwan, institutional histories, museum studies, and Asia-Pacific–Europe entanglements.


[1] Tayal is a commonly used shortened form of Atayal, referring to the Indigenous Atayal people and their language in Taiwan.