The Surprising Spiritual Connection Between Indonesia and Hong Kong

As you enter the main exhibition room at CHAT, the Centre for Heritage, Art and Textiles, you are faced with six large and colourful panels lit from the inside, with photographic studio portraits of six Hakka spirit mediums from the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan.

These are photographs of three women and three men, and collectively form a work by artist Yip Kai-chun called “My Deity Wants Me to Wear This,” part of the ongoing exhibition Tidal Weavers: Islands Exchanges. The spirit mediums appear in full traditional costume because, as Yip explains, “it has been dictated to them in dreams, by the deity that possesses them when they enter the trance.” 

The way in which Yip, himself of Hakka descent, has chosen to represent the six individuals creates an unexpected stillness, one that allows us to look very carefully at their features and the decoration on their richly embroidered clothes. The six portraits freeze the spirit mediums in one single motion – a significant contrast with the frenzy that is the trademark of spirit possessions. 

Weaving together cultures

Yip is one of 14 participants in Tidal Weavers, an ambitious exhibition that flows between art, craft, and community, exploring water and textile as living archives of memory, migration, and connection. Bringing together artists, weavers, and researchers from across the South China Sea, it unfolds through shared experiences — conversations, meals, and collaborative making — that weave new ties of friendship and knowledge. Emphasising slowness, reciprocity and care, the project honours water, land and cloth as carriers of both life and collective memory.

The project grew out of a long-term friendship between Indonesian artist and curator Ade Darmawan — the exhibition’s artistic director — and Takahashi Mizuki, CHAT’s executive director and chief curator of CHAT. “Ade has been interested in how Indonesia transitioned from being a water-based culture to a very land-centric culture,” says CHAT associate curator Bruce Li. “In contemporary times, we see the ocean as a place of division, because we see ourselves as living on land. Ade wanted to trace back to a time when a lot of trade, narratives, stories, folklore were spreading, via the ocean.”

That’s how CHAT decided to organise a series of seven-week residencies that saw artists swap places between Hong Kong and Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines, thus extending Ade Darmawan’s idea of water connections linking the different landmasses of the South China Sea. “CHAT is the only institution in Asia that brings textile and contemporary art together,” says Li. “And we really wanted to expand the idea that many people, especially in Hong Kong have of Asia, which is not only East Asia, but also Southeast Asia and Central Asia as well.”

Hakka traditions

The photos of “My Deity Wants Me to Wear This” are products of just this kind of cultural exchange. Yip made all of these portraits during his residency in the West Kalimantan town of Singkawang, where much of the population is descended from Hakka migrants who left the mountains of Guangdong and Fujian and travelled to Borneo in several waves, beginning in the 17th century. The population around Singkawang is particularly mixed, with many people also having roots in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong, among Malays that have migrated from nearby islands, and in the indigenous Dayak communities. 

In one image, a woman possessed by the Lotus Prince (蓮花太子 lin4 faa1 taai3 zi2) — possibly an emanation related to Kwun Yum — stands firm, gripping a ritual spear and meeting the camera’s gaze, lotus motifs on her costume echoed by the pale blue background. Another spirit, Prince Nezha (哪吒太子 naa4 zaa1 taai3 zi2), inhabits another medium crouched in a kung fu-like stance against deep red. One spirit medium holds a fan mid-gesture like a frozen scene from Chinese opera, while another, robed in gold and green before a purple backdrop, calmly smokes an ornate pipe. Against emerald green, a man possessed by the Dayak spirit Datok Elang Putih licks a curved blade, eyes rolled white, a necklace of bones and a monkey skull on his chest. Finally, a woman in black and gold silk stands before bright yellow, her eyes glazed in trance as Xuan Tian Shang Di (玄天上帝 jyun4 tin1 soeng6 dai3), the Taoist Supreme Lord of the Dark Heaven, takes hold.

The mediums that Yip met and documented all have day jobs that are very different to their roles as tatungs, a word used in Hakka to mean “jumping child” (跳童 tiu3 tong4). (In Cantonese the term is usually gei1 tung4 (乩童), which literally translates as “divining child.”) The woman possessed by Prince Nezha is normally a 25-year-old influencer with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, where she can be seen dancing, getting tattooed, and giving fashion and skincare advice. Others are teachers, café owners and singers. “I quite like this duality, actually,” says Yip.

An overlooked culture

Yip says he had no idea about tatung traditions before his residency, but living in West Kalimantan gave him the chance to experience the tatung rituals linked with Cap Go Meh, a Hakka celebration that takes place on the 15th day of the lunar new year, marking the first full moon of the year. In order to purify the land of evil spirits and bless it with good luck and prosperity, the spirit mediums go on very lively parades and perform dragon dances and sacred ceremonies. 

The celebrations are both festive and solemn, with the mediums showing the invulnerability conferred to them by the spirits that possess them by piercing their mouths with big hooks and metallic spears. Their bodies appear immune to pain, whether it is that of piercing one’s cheeks or stepping on burning coals. The procession continues until the mediums arrive in different temples, often carried atop special chairs or ladders. 

A video shot by Yip, which is displayed in the exhibition between the large spirit medium photographs, shows part of the Cap Go Meh parade. The video’s halting narrative is interspersed by Yip’s own reflections, through sentences that appear in a series of slides, like scattered thoughts inspired by the proceedings. “Really, such a thriving practice of spirit mediums was beyond my knowledge,” recites one. “Logic shut down, sensations wide open,” we read in another. And: “A lost realm of Chinese deities awaits on a distant island.” 

Other slides record Yip’s observations: “Attires, colours, movements, music, incense”; “One deity, multiple tatungs. The dissemination of identity.” The vastness and diversity of Hakka culture presents, in the tatung mediums of Borneo, a level of complexities that can come as a surprise even to a Hong Kong Hakka descendant like Yip, illustrating how deeply this culture has absorbed elements both from its historic origins in northern China but also from the many different places through which its descendants have travelled.

Tatung practices were once common in mainland China, mostly but not exclusively in Hakka communities, and while the Cultural Revolution and other upheavals in China wiped out many of those traditions, they continue to thrive in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. They exist in Hong Kong, too, but Yip only became aware of this after being told by the tatung in West Kalimantan.

“We are different, yet the same and equal,” reads one of the slides in Yip’s video. Islands, communities and traditions come together at CHAT, where cultures once separated by water are reunited. These interlaced threads trace the many identities shaped by migration and exchange, each finding a voice in Hong Kong’s open harbour, a meeting place for shared and distinct stories alike.

Tidal Weavers: Island Exchanges runs until October 26, 2025. This story was produced with the support of CHAT. Zolima CityMag maintains editorial independence over its content.

All photos in this article were taken by May James for Zolima CityMag.