Written by Weitian
I was impressed when I saw the Native art style sculpture in YVR; the statue looked like this: A couple of men sitting in a boat, surrounded by some creatures, twisting with each other. I had a unique feeling with it that I hadn’t experienced with any other art. Later, I learned that the name of it is “The Spirit of Haida Gwaii,” created by Haida artist Bill Reid; that was my first impression of Haida art.
To describe my intuitive feeling about Bill Reid’s artworks using one word: it differs from the artists in my homeland, separate from the well-known artists always featured in art history books. Art history is always about Renaissance, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Dadaism, Post-Modernism, etc. Bill Reid’s artworks are about another path that doesn’t appear in the Western-centric narrative art history we know.
One thing that is easy to notice in Bill Reid’s artworks is that they are unrealistic and abstract. This alone is not something very innovative in the art world. In fact, there are some similarities between Bill Reid’s art and Pablo Picasso’s cubist art. They are both representations of some real-world objects, they both have clean lines and shapes, human and natural creatures are usually the subject, etc. By listing their similarity, I’m not including Bill Reid’s art in the Western-domination art history, but to compare their difference better. Although they share some characteristics, they still have significant discrepancies. Picasso was painting in realistic styles long before he transitioned to abstract. At the same time, Bill Reid’s class is relatively consistent, which is easy to explain considering that his art is based on Haida culture, while Picasso tried experimenting with a different expression of reality. This may also explain why Bill Reid’s art and almost all Haida-style art have a kind of harmony inside, because they are the same way as they were created, assuming there is no significant art movement in Native art history, as Western art history has several.
Moreover, Picasso’s modern art usually stands for something else: a war happening thousands of miles away, a metaphor for some ideology, or the future of all human beings. In contrast, Bill Reid Haida’s Indigenous art is about this land and the people and the creatures that live on it. A well-accepted definition of art is: “Art is about self-expression,” probably limited by a Western point of view. From my perspective, the primary purpose of Haida art is not to express but to narrate and describe the essence of this land, in other words, the spirit, as the name of the sculpture: The heart of Haida Gwaii, the energy was here before modernity, still is, and always will be.