1 INTRODUCTION Accounts of Taiwan and Its History Have Been
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
INTRODUCTION Accounts of Taiwan and its history have been profoundly influenced by cultural and political ideologies, which have fluctuated radically over the past four centuries on the island. Small parts of Taiwan were ruled by the Dutch (1624-1662), Spanish (1626-1642), Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga)1 and his heirs (1662-1683), and a large part by Qing Dynasty China (1683-1895). Thereafter, the whole of the island was under Japanese control for half a century (1895-1945), and after World War II, it was taken over by the Republic of China (ROC), being governed for more than four decades by the authoritarian government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party,2 before democratization began in earnest in the late 1980s. Taiwan’s convoluted history and current troubled relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which claims Taiwan is “a renegade province” of the PRC, has complicated the world’s understanding of Taiwan. Many Western studies of Taiwan, primarily concerning its politics and economic development, have been conducted as an 1 Pinyin is employed in this dissertation as its Mandarin romanization system, though there are exceptions for names of places which have been officially transliterated differently, and for names of people who have been known to Western scholarship in different forms of romanization. In these cases, the more popular forms are used. All Chinese names are presented in the same order as they would appear in Chinese, surname first, given name last, unless the work is published in English, in which case the surname appears last. 2 The KMT was founded in China in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen and others after the Wuchuang Uprising of 1911 set in motion the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and establishment of the Republic of China. Later led by Chiang Kai-shek, the KMT-controlled ROC government ruled much of China from 1928 until its retreat to Taiwan in 1949 after defeat by Chinese Communist Party revolutionaries under Mao Zedong. 1 adjunct of Chinese studies. Before the 1990s, local scholarly research and writing on the history of the island was also circumscribed within the framework of Chinese history due to the Sino-centric cultural politics of the former KMT party-state regime, which was intent on asserting its claim—in competition with the Chinese Communist Party regime in Beijing—to being the sole legitimate government of the entire territory once ruled by the Qing Dynasty, including Taiwan. Under this Sino-centric framework, the historical significance and cultural legacies of the Japanese colonial era of Taiwan’s history, from 1895 to 1945, were not fully explored in scholarly discourses. This is highly regrettable because it was under the Japanese rule that Taiwan underwent a radical transformation toward modernization that has had fundamental significance for the shaping of modern Taiwan’s complex identity. In contrast to other Asian countries such as China or Japan, whose initial phase of modernization signified Westernization, Taiwan’s modernization has been of greater complexity because it was intertwined with the realities of Japanese colonial rule, and it evolved as a secondhand, Japanized modernity. In their endeavor to negotiate a Taiwanese identity, Japanese-educated Taiwanese intelligentsia oscillated between Japan and China, between the colonial “mother country” and their ancestral “motherland.” This dissertation is a study of modern Taiwanese painting as a cultural document that conveys historical realities, aesthetic strategies and cultural discourses of the Japanese colonial period. It represents an attempt to place Taiwanese artists’ pictorial representations of Taiwan, of the Taiwanese people, and of the artists’ personal visions and sensibilities within their proper historical, social, and literary contexts, with the aim of exploring what factors contributed to the particular forms of those images, and how, in turn, the images played a role in addressing Taiwan’s identity issue and developing new cultural representations in the colonial society. While the development of early modern Taiwanese art was generally viewed as an outcome of colonial enlightenment and modernization, during the first four decades of 2 post-war KMT rule, commentators on Taiwanese art and culture of the period were prone to foreground indications of ethnic resistance and anti-Japanese sentiment. From an ethnocentric perspective, the first-generation Taiwanese artists were often characterized by local critics and biographers as cultural, and national, heroes for their artistic achievement at the official salons in colonial Taiwan and Japan. Examination of Taiwan’s literary and artistic works of the period, however, discloses ambiguity, multivalency and contradiction in attitudes toward, and representations of, Taiwanese cultural identity, which was constantly shaped and reshaped by complex layers of historical constructs. Taiwanese art and culture is not monotonal but highly variegated in philosophical or ideological content, rooted as it is in the complicated political history and cultural encounters in Taiwan’s past. In exploring the artworks of the Japanese colonial era, therefore, it is necessary to go beyond the narrow perspective of anti-Japanese antagonism, and to avoid reading those works as homogeneous expressions of a single political or cultural mindset. This dissertation argues that the diversity and hybridity marked in the Taiwanese art produced during the Japanese colonial period manifest a pluralism of responses and approaches to colonial modernity. Rather than addressing the harshness of Japanese rule or expressing anti-colonial ideas, a great number of the Taiwanese paintings reveal ideas about and attitudes of the artists themselves as aspiring Taiwan-born modern artists. This study focuses both on analyses of their artworks and the ideologies that inform them. While abundant monographic studies of first-generation modern Taiwanese artists provide guidance for this investigation, contemporary sources and various aspects of recent scholarship in post-colonial studies, Japanese imperialism, and modern Taiwanese literature provide ideas and perspectives for examining questions of cultural ideology. Historical writing on Taiwanese art of the Japanese colonial period appeared first in the 1950s. Wang Baiyuan’s essay “Taiwan meishu yundong shi” (History of Taiwan’s Art Movements) was the first publication to provide a survey of the “new art” pioneered 3 by Japanese-educated Taiwanese.3 Published in 1955, a decade after Japanese rule ended and Taiwan came under control of the Republic of China, it outlines the development of Taiwanese modern art by means of chronological accounts of major art associations and biographies of artists who belonged to these associations and participated in their exhibitions. Wang’s essay is a useful documentation of Taiwan’s art groups from the 1920s up to the 1950s, listing their activities, membership, and titles of the award-winning works exhibited. His writing, however, is guided by a nationalist perspective that addresses Taiwan’s modern art movements as adjuncts to Chinese and Taiwanese nationalist movements. It overemphasizes anti-Japanese sentiment within the local art world and simplistically characterizes cultural developments in Taiwan under Japanese rule in terms of ethnic antagonism. The first book on Taiwanese art, Xie Lifa’s Rijushidai Taiwan meishu yundong shi (History of Taiwanese Art Movements of the Japanese Occupation Period) was published in 1978.4 It consists primarily of discussions of Taiwan’s early modern art societies and art exhibitions, including two official colonial art salons that were deliberately omitted in Wang Baiyuan’s survey.5 In his exploration 3 Wang Baiyuan, “Taiwan meishu yundong shi,” (History of Taiwan’s Art Movements) Taipei wenwu, 3/4 (Mar. 1955): 16-65. 4 Xie’s book is actually a compilation of essays serialized in Yishujia (Artist) magazine in 29 installments from June 1975 to December 1977. 5 Yen Chuan-ying notes that, due to ideological pressure, Wang Baiyuan intentionally characterized the colonial-era non-governmental art associations and exhibitions as the mainstay of modern Taiwanese art, omitting discussion of the influential official salons that were founded earlier and were imitated by the non-governmental salons. Yen Chuan-ying, “Rijushiqi Taiwan meishushi de yanjiu,” (Research on Taiwanese art under Japanese rule) Proceeding of the Conference Minguo yilai guoshi yanjiu de huigu yu zhanwang (A Review and Prospect of Research on National History since the Minguo [R.O.C] Period) Department of History, National Taiwan University (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 1992) vol.2, 1513-14. For the same issue of Taipei wenwu (see note 3) Wang wrote an essay on the official art salons of the Japanese colonial period, published under the pen name Wang Yigang. See Wang Yigang [Wang Baiyuan], “Taizhan, fuzhan,” (Taitens, Futens) Taipei wenwu 3/4 (Mar. 1955): 65-69. 4 of the formative years of Taiwanese modern art, Xie highlights twenty-six Taiwanese artists and four Japanese colonial salon jurors as the leading art figures in Taiwan of the period. Like Wang, however, his accentuation of anti-Japanese nationalism narrows the perspectives and circumscribes the criteria he employs to examine and evaluate his subjects. Within the context of Japanese rule, Japanese-educated Taiwanese artists are appraised in terms of their contributions not only to the advancement of Taiwan’s modern art, but