yao (Mien) ritual paintings
Gallery 2 - Asian Arts
Waikoloa Museum Walkway's piece
This beautifully carved example is one of only an estimated 420 Waka Huia preserved in museums around the world, making it one of the rarest and most culturally significant pieces in the Waikoloa Museum Walkway.
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Most people who walk through this section of the Museum Walkway don't know that they are actually passing through a sacred space. Unlike other Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, the Yao People of Southern China, Laos, and Vietnam do not have ornate temples or other places of worship. Instead, they rely on priests who carry with them these large painted scrolls, which are placed around a meeting place for ceremonies and then rolled up or folded and carried to another place. ,
The extinct Huia bird
A Portable sacred world
At first glance these 21 paintings may look like a gallery of separate stories. They appear instead to belong to a ritual ensemble: a group of images designed to work together.
Among Yao or Mien communities of southern China and mainland Southeast Asia, priests traditionally hung painted scrolls in temporary shrines created inside homes. The assembled paintings brought an ordered spirit world into the ceremonial space. Deities at its highest levels were joined by officials, messengers, guardians, animal companions, and judges of the underworld.
The tradition is strongly shaped by Daoism, but it also reflects Buddhist and local religious ideas. The paintings could be used in ceremonies concerned with initiation, protection, healing, prosperity, funerals, and the proper relationship between the living, their ancestors, and the unseen world.
Look closely: which figures sit enthroned, which arrive on horseback, and which carry documents, weapons, offerings, or instruments of authority? Their scale, position, clothing, and attributes help reveal a celestial hierarchy.
