ART on view that is not 100% black 92 It's seems there is a strip of black By Roy Hamilton The exhibition Art of the Austronesians: The Legacy of Indo-Pacifi c Voyaging, on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA until August 28, 2016, showcases nearly two hundred rare and extraordinarily diverse works of art from the Austronesian-speaking cultures of maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacifi c. Although archaeologists and linguistic specialists have made great strides in recent decades in understanding the prehistory of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, the story of their dispersal through migration is as yet little known to the public. Even the word “Austronesian” is likely to evoke perplexed reactions. The fi rst goal of the exhibition, then, is to illustrate through art the story of how Austronesian-speaking peoples came to occupy a region spanning more than halfway around the globe, a remarkable feat accomplished with sailing vessels in prehistoric times. On a deeper level, the exhibition challenges longprevailing paradigms about relationships among the various peoples of the Indo-Pacifi c region and their arts. For example, the arts of Indonesia are rarely juxtaposed in a single exhibition with works from the Pacifi c, despite the close underlying linguistic and cultural relationships that connect these widely scattered peoples. When art historians draw parallels between Indonesian arts and those of other regions, they almost always turn instead to India—a region that undeniably exerted strong infl uences on Indonesian arts in the long run, but whose infl uence postdated the expansion of Austronesianspeaking peoples into Indonesia from the Philippines by some three thousand years. By focusing on pan- Austronesian relationships, many Indonesian works of art can be appreciated in a new light, often appearing to refl ect multiple sources of inspiration simultaneously. The widely used classifi cation “Melanesia” represents another problematic paradigm. Most exhibitions of Pacifi c art juxtapose material from diverse regions including the Sepik River, Papuan Gulf, Huon Gulf, New Ireland, and the Solomon Islands (to mention just a few of the better-known stylistic regions). The peoples of the Sepik and the Papuan Gulf, however, are speakers of Papuan languages, descendants of populations who inhabited New Guinea for perhaps forty thousand years before the fi rst Austronesian speakers appeared in sailing canoes on their outer shores. The cultures of the two groups in many ways could not be more different, and yet their arts have been thrown together without regard for these fundamental distinctions. Technically speaking, “Austronesian” is the name of a language family, not a collective name for a group of peoples or cultures. The name derives from auster, Latin for “south wind,” and nesos, Greek for islands, thus the languages of the southern islands, or as they are sometimes called, “the lands below the winds.” This term is extraordinarily apt, because the more than twelve hundred closely related languages that now make FIG. 1 (above): Canoe, chinurikuran. Yami, Botel Tobago Island, Taiwan. Mid 20th century. Wood, paint, feathers, twine. L: 460 cm. Anonymous gift, Fowler Museum at UCLA, inv. X91.5703a–d. Image © courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo: Don Cole, 2014. Art of the Austronesians: The Legacy of Indo-Pacifi c Voyaging By Roy Hamilton
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