Dou Yi-Jen

Dou Yi-Jen (Chinese: 豆宜臻; Dòu yí zhēn; Saisiyat: hewen atain tawtawazay) was born in 1993 in Nanzhuang township, Miaoli county, Taiwan Her father is a Saisiyat aborigine and her mother is from Hakka. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of Arts (also known as TNUA). She has been locally recognized with her individual and collaborative artworks for cultural preservation. 
==Personal Life==
Dou was born in 1993 in Nanzhuang township, Miaoli county. Her father is a Saisiyat aborigine and her mother is from Hakka. Her parents seldom mentioned their indigenous conntection so that she knew very little about her root. She later left her hometown and moved to northern Taiwan to study in the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University(also known as HSNU). In 2017, she graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts and continued her study at the Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts. Her father's llness later aspired her to reconnect with her root.
==Career==
In 2015, Dou began her fieldwork to review , wanting to find her identity of aboriginal and the cultural values.In 2017, she planned these exhibitions: One day of Shaoxing Community (Chinese: 一日紹興：紹興社區文史回顧展) in Taipei and Matsu Village sixty-years (Chinese:離散．六〇: 馬祖新村主題展) in Taoyuan. In the year of 2018, she won the first prize in the Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award for her collaborative artwork Micro-Ruins Project 2017 (Chinese: 麥可盧因斯計畫 2017) with Yi-Ching Chien. Later, in 2019, she was the recipient of the Next Art Tainan Award for her Micro-Ruins Project (Chinese: 麥可盧因斯計畫). 
She received the Grand Prize of Visual Art in the 5th Pulima Art Award in 2020 for her work Crossing Mountains (Chinese: 越山; Saisayat: lohizaw). She would like to know about her tribe by conducting fieldwork on the historical route treaded by her ancesters. 
===Art Techniques===
The main idea of Dou's works center on tracing back the past and the reappearance of traditional cultures. Dou completed the artwork Crossing Mountain by spending nearly half a year climbing mountains to search for the past of her tribe. She exploits a wide variety of media to express the concepts, such as sketches, photos, and displays of historical objects. Besides, she holds collaborative exhibitions with other artists, such as Yi-Ching Chien, Yi-Chun Chen, and Yun-Ting Hong.
==Artworks and Exhibitions==
===Artworks===
The artworks of Dou Yi-Jen created with a wide variety of media, tend to be concrete and realistic.The Micro-Ruins Project draws materials from communities facing demolition due to urban renewal. The collected, discarded materials are used to construct a space, leading viewers to recall and imagine the scene back then. Other artworks includes Looking Back, a Place of Gathering (Chinese: 回望，相約之地; Saisayat: kaSpalawan).Looking Back, a Place of Gathering aims to piece together the historical story of the creator’s family and the ethnic group by recompose traditional buildings and migration maps.
Crossing Mountains is made by constantly overlapping and correcting the oral dictation of the elderly. With the experience of walking and visiting, the artists plotted a road to the memory of the past. This work won the First Place of 2020 Pulima Art Award Visual Arts.
===Exhibitions===
Between 2014 and 2015, most exhibitions Dou participated in were held by her alma maters, Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University|HSNU and TNUA. In 2016, the new generation arts, which is an exhibition related to environmental protection, aimed at awakening people’s consciousness of purifying mountain forest.Afterwards, Dou Yi-Jen started to curate the exhibitions. The next year she was in charge of One Day in Shaoxing: A Retrospective Exhibition of Shaoxing Community Culture and History in Taipei and Dispersion. Sixty: Matsu New Village Theme Exhibition in Zhongli.In 2021, pa’inrowa’ flip – the return of Saixia’s youth (Chinese: 翻轉——賽夏青年的迴返; Saisayat: ’pa’inrowa’), reunited Saisiyat artists to share how they reconnected to their hometown.
Category:People from Miaoli County
Category:1993 births
Category:Taiwanese people