Editor’s words:

 

Originally introduced in the 1990s by Mi’kmaw knowledge holders Albert and Murdena Marshall alongside biologist Cheryl Bartlett, “Two-Eyed Seeing” calls for equitable dialogue between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. Following this principle, our column encourages like-minded, nuanced cross-ethnic knowledge production that extends beyond the context of Taiwan—through which we continue to learn how a bilingual platform might support such discourse.

 

In this issue, Yixak—a cross-ethnic writing group from Xinjiang—offers a critical response to the cultural appropriation debate sparked by Dan Er’s solo exhibition at MACA Art Center in Beijing (March 22–June 15, 2025). While widely praised, the exhibition sidelined voices from Xinjiang. Yixak offers a timely counternarrative that reopens its cultural and political stakes, bridging a gap in current discourse.

 

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As the one among us with a Uyghur background, I understand the appeal of scripts that flow with a grace unfamiliar to the squared structure of Chinese characters. Still, when I encountered a solo exhibition at Beijing’s MACA Art Center by an artist of Han ethnic origin titled Greeting, referring to the Uyghur word yaxshimusiz, I was taken aback. For a moment, I felt as though I’d wandered into a stylized IKEA showroom, where foreign words are repurposed as exotic décor. Then it dawned on me: the title was a Uyghur phrase reshaped through Chinese phonetics—just like my own name. And yaxshimusiz is no mere “hello”—it’s the respectful form, the one offered to strangers, to elders. Yes, like Mandarin, this is a language with honorifics.

 

I’ve seen a few artists in recent years try to engage with cultural “others” by using words from languages they’re learning—often simple, introductory phrases. But that simplicity speaks volumes. The people who speak these languages aren’t expected to be in the room. Come to think of it: would anyone name an exhibition Bonjour if French speakers were the intended audience? Tellingly, no one on the exhibition team appears to have any familiarity with the language—or the culture—it gestures toward.

 

An old utility pole in Xinjiang, wrapped in Adras fabric. Photo by the authors.

 

The exhibition is built almost entirely from Uyghur cultural elements—traditional wooden printing blocks used for textile design, Adras textile patterns, decorative plasterwork, and dance—with a body of work based on collection and replication. However, instead of developing an interpretive position, the work slips into cultural appropriation and misrepresentation, at times even reinforcing ethnic stereotypes. The artist claims to have studied these traditions under several mentors. However, Xinjiang is home to 47 ethnic groups. While Uyghur culture is central to the region’s identity, it does not encompass the entirety of it. In this light, Dan Er may have acted on a preexisting bias—conflating Xinjiang with Uyghur identity—even before any formal instruction had taken place. Moreover, the cultural contexts of her teachers, the ongoing evolution of these traditions today, and the rationale behind her own artistic choices remain largely unaddressed in the exhibition.

 

In the two-minute video excerpt of a dance originally choreographed specifically for Dan Er by a “well-known local dancer” named Mayira from Kashgar, the artist records the piece within a contemporary video art convention: a black void that isolates Dan Er as the sole performer. As a result, what I saw was not, as the artist describes it, a guest submitting herself to her cultural counterpart’s guidance, but rather the erasure of the dancer—both from the frame and the exhibition credits. Can you imagine any rigorous institutional occasion where an artist isn’t addressed even once by their full name—especially when the name Mayira is so common in the region?

 

Adras weaving techniques on display inside the Aman Isa Khan Mausoleum Restoration in Shache. Photo by the authors.

 

In the artist’s Xuan paper-based series employing wooden stamps and Adras motifs, various abstract patterns are extracted from their original media and transferred onto Xuan paper. While Xuan paper may be a familiar and neutral choice for most Beijing audiences, Adras refers specifically to silk warp-resist dyeing—a technique inseparable from its fiber substrate. When these motifs are placed onto Xuan paper, itself another fiber-based material, the result is a redundant layering of fiber upon fiber, producing a tautological material gesture and an awkward visual language. Likewise, the artist catalogs the wooden printing blocks she has gathered; stamp number 158 is arbitrarily selected and imprinted on paper according to her own design, effectively severing the pattern from its historical and cultural significance. This gesture seems primarily in service of contemporary art’s aesthetic framework.

 

When Dan Er introduces the patterns she has collected, she attributes their abstraction and confinement to botanical and geometric motifs to the constraints of Islamic iconoclasm, while elsewhere describing her plasterwork as emerging from a “critical crossroads of East and West.” This tension between visual austerity and cultural hybridity risks collapsing into a self-referential loop of imagined tradition. What proves more meaningful is the effort to dismantle such impressions. Without it, this collage-like narrative merely lifts fragments out of context, applying a “traditional” filter that obscures the actual visual conditions of the present.

 

The artist’s ambiguity has consequences—critics often take her words at face value. For example, one Chinese-language review describes Dan Er’s plaster sculptures as resembling Aywan dwellings, likely echoing impressions directly from the artist. However, aywan refers to a large, vaulted hall or open-fronted chamber that opens onto a courtyard, making the review’s mention of heavy relief walls and tall side windows somewhat misleading. If anything, this work more closely resembles a mismatched collage commonly found in contemporary Chinese village architecture rather than a specific architectural tradition like the Aywan.

 

A typical entrance to a Uyghur home in Ili. Given Xinjiang’s vast geography and regional variation, it’s not uncommon for Uyghurs to go their whole lives without ever seeing an aywan. Photo by the authors.

 

In short, the exhibition’s appropriative and imitative gestures—lacking a clear agenda—tend to be shallow and trite; when viewed in cross-cultural contexts, they become even more jarring, and at times, disrespectful. By sidestepping open dialogue and overlooking the failure of signification central to the exhibition, both the artist’s self-effacing claim of being “a guest” and MACA Art Center’s framing of her as someone who has “taken on a translator’s duties” inadvertently reinforce the exclusion of the very communities depicted—communities fully capable of engaging in meaningful dialogue, offering precise cultural and linguistic translation, and producing or interpreting resonant artistic work. This absence—or, as one WeChat post put it, Dan Er’s position atop “the ruins of language”—reveals a mentality that paves the way for cognitive exploitation. 

 

As a result, the artist and institution maintain control over the narrative, wiping out whole communities to make room for a fleeting outsider’s incomplete view, swapping rich ethnic languages for the sterile rules of the white cube. Thus, scrutiny and condemnation turn to the marginalized rather than the artist. Such interpretive violence, constructed by the artist in collaboration with the institution, is even more destructive than the actual misappropriation displayed in the exhibition. In this context, honest and open dialogue may be the best way to reduce harm. Unfortunately, the institution chose instead to test the audience’s tolerance in a public forum titled “Becoming the Other: On Silence, Voice and the Ethics of Representation,” which purportedly addressed Dan Er’s misreading. Its press release, bizarrely featuring a map from a German colonial expo and Johannes Fabian’s 1983 book criticizing Western anthropology, revealed a lack of direct contextual understanding and ignored the elephant in the room, thus reducing key debates to empty rhetoric. 

 

From my experience, traveling back and forth over several years, living in a place for a few months, and learning from a few mentors—such encounters alone do not make the complex culture of an unfamiliar land truly part of one’s being. Rather, these experiences should inspire a deeper respect for the cultures we engage with and a careful awareness of the boundaries necessary for genuine cultural exchange. Cultural appropriation cannot be softened merely by claims of humility, nor dismissed simply because some of your friends from Xinjiang say it’s not an issue. If real dialogue had taken place, some glaring misconceptions might’ve been cleared up. Take the artist’s comment in a MACA Art Center interview, for example: “One may address any Uyghur female as ‘Guli,’ meaning flower.” It’s not only inaccurate—it reflects a startling lack of basic respect. Just as troubling is the casual romanticization of ethnic identity, like the claim that “people in Xinjiang are born knowing how to dance.” This kind of stereotype might sound harmless—even flattering—but it reduces an entire group to a cliché, erasing individuality, effort, and cultural depth. Even in our mostly Han ethnic collective, being from Xinjiang means we’ve all lost count of how many times someone jumps in with something like:

 

“Oh? But you don’t look like you’re from Xinjiang.”

“You know how to talk like someone from Xinjiang? Come on, say a few lines!”

“Can you wiggle your neck? Show me how!”

Thanks to the internet, anyone can now say to someone from Xinjiang:

“AppleU (a slangy way of saying ‘hey buddy’)—drop a rap!”