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New Boundaries of Contemporary Art from Taiwan

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New Boundaries of Contemporary Art from Taiwan Yu-Chieh Li New Boundaries of Contemporary Art from Taiwan he exhibition Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan, curated by Dr. An-yi Pan for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, TCornell University (August 16–December 21, 2014), has achieved a pioneering survey of the art scene in Taiwan over the past ten years. An update to the 2004 exhibition Contemporary Taiwanese Art in the Era of Contention, the first historical survey in North America of art in post-martial law Taiwan, also curated by An-yi Pan, Jie is again a collaboration between the Herbert F. Johnson Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and includes more emerging artists than the 2004 exhibition did. It is peculiar that, aside from these two examples, there have been so few art exhibitions in North America devoted to researching the current art scene in Taiwan; nor are there sufficient art historical publications in English on this topic, despite the fact that work by Taiwanese artists has appeared in international art exhibitions since the 1990s.1 Although the Taiwanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was founded in 1995, and the first international Taipei Biennale was inaugurated in 1998, Taiwanese art hasn’t achieved wide international recognition comparable to contemporary Chinese art or contemporary Indian art, and the lack of research on contemporary art from Taiwan in the West stands in sharp contrast to the high exposure of contemporary Chinese art both in art exhibitions and academia. In 2014 alone, there were three publications dedicated to contemporary Chinese Art after the Cultural Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History, by Paul Gladston; Contemporary Chinese Art, by Wu Hung; and Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era, by Jane DeBevoise. There are also multiple book projects about modern or contemporary Art from India and Korea currently in preparation. So how should Taiwan be positioned in this wave of the institutionalization of national contemporary and modern art histories? The most complex and sensitive issue that needs to be identified before a narrative about art from Taiwan can unfold is how one defines Taiwan as a nation.2 The current Taiwanese government is often considered illegitimate in today’s world politics; it was established on the basis of the Chiang Kai- shek Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime that relocated to Taiwan in 1949, after the Communist Party took over mainland China. Taiwan’s economic and social condition is greatly determined by the political climate in East Asia and the particular tensions that exist between the USA and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). From the colonial periods to the post-martial 82 Vol. 14 No. 2 law era, Taiwanese were taught to be Japanese, then Chinese, and then Taiwanese. The identity of “New Taiwanese” today is constructed with Lee Teng-hui’s policy of “Two States,” which he announced in the late 1990s, proclaiming that Taiwan and China are two distinct countries, not two parted entities that should be reunited because of a shared historical past. Thus school curricula started to include narratives of multi-ethnicity and the immigration and colonial histories of Taiwan, instead of merely focusing on the grand narrative that covers five thousand years of greater China. These constantly shifting identities and personal and national boundaries strongly influenced the works selected for Jie. Because the Taiwanese “nation-state” has never been successfully claimed under the pressure of mainland China, it can be said to exist largely in the world view and daily life of its inhabitants. An-yi Pan brings up Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” in his catalogue essay to illustrate how Taiwan’s social reality is imagined by Taiwanese people, just as it is imagined in each nation-state through certain constructed cultural roots that its people identify with. Jie goes beyond exploring the awkward status of Taiwan’s national identity on the world map, as well as its influence on the politics and economics of the Taiwanese, and, further, explores how this is experienced on a personal scale in reaction to the changing global world. The “boundaries” in the exhibition title, according to An-yi Pan, come from the Buddhist concept of the world that “the mind’s perception conceives the boundary through the rousing of the mind and the moving of thoughts.”3 This boundary determines both temporal and spatial spheres of nations and individuals— and, thus, also defines a person’s identity. Because of the country’s complex colonial past, boundaries of the Taiwanese and Taiwan keep shifting, and new boundaries keep forming while old ones are constantly challenged. Thus comments An-yi Pan, “An individual’s or society’s response to the global environment reflects the continuous emerging, consolidating, and vanishing of boundaries.”4 In this respect, Jie is about the self-positioning of Taiwanese artists in both the private and public spheres. An-yi Pan frames this exhibition through proposing several themes within the framework of “boundaries,” including global warming and globalization, global community in the Internet age, anxiety, kuso (a Japanese word literally meaning “shitty,” and which in Taiwan is used to describe a funny, light form of pop cultural parody), animamix (animation + comics), and landscape. Those thematic concerns, through the diversity of the works, can be further expanded to issues such as mental landscapes, the domestic and international political situation, reinterpretations of Western classical and Chinese classical art, feminism, pop culture, and immigration. The actual installation of the artworks was based on consideration of the gallery space and different media requirements, instead of on thematic divisions. The selection of themes and artists reveals not just the multiple identities of the Taiwanese, but, more importantly, it shows various approaches to the idea of territory and the personal boundaries imagined by different generations—in this case, in people ranging from the age of twenty-nine Vol. 14 No. 2 83 to eighty-nine. Jie’s precursor, Contemporary Taiwanese Art in the Era of Contention, contained work directed more at seeking to construct a Taiwanese identity and reflecting upon its entanglement within the past and present. Although these kinds of works in Jie can be seen to arouse critical readings of the current political situation, they are framed in a humorous way and are open to multiple readings rather than contributing to grand narratives. Jie also reflects that there is a growing number of female and young artists in the current art scene: in Jie, ten out of thirty-three artists were female, and eleven out of thirty-three artists were born after 1980. There are no prints and few works on paper in Jie, while over one third of the works are moving images. Mapping the Boundaries Because it is beyond the limited scope of this article to discuss each and every work, the following will be a comparison of approaches taken by different generations of artists toward the idea of boundaries—the earlier generation of artists in Taiwan experienced the White Terror,5 while the second generation, born in the late 1970s and 1980s, grew up in a rather liberated society, and has no clear memory about the period of single-party leadership under the Kuomintang. Jie was presented at the moment when the Taiwanese government was resuming conversations with PRC and the debate about national identity was again at a crossroads. Thus Jie reflected the multiple personal choices about boundaries: If Taiwan’s identity is still a question mark, how do the Taiwanese understand themselves? How to Construct a National Identity? The exhibition started with Tu Wei-Cheng’s monument to a fictional Bu Nam civilization, and included a gate in wall relief with two guardians positioned in front of it. In looking closely at the details of the carvings, one finds modern elements such as television sets, video game controllers, cables, loud speakers, headsets—mostly electronic devices in prevalent use in the first decade of the 2000s—and, in addition, fake Chinese characters that are of no identifiable date. The Bu Nam culture looks like an anomaly within the history of world civilizations because it is a mixture of forms found in ancient cultures as well as in modern life and is brought together to claim a previously undiscovered Taiwanese civilization—a fabrication by the artist. Inspired by an eagerness in society to justify the legitimacy of the Taiwanese nation through rewriting its cultural history, when this piece was conceived, Tu Wei-Cheng attempted to “create a new mythology for my identity and fabricated ‘facts’ about the existence of this civilization.”6 The Bu Nam myth is constructed through a process familiar in the canonization of civilizations—its unearthing, display, knowledge production, and the design of museum shop goods—which determines the value of the cultural relics. And what matters is not how realistically the fiction is presented, but that people believe in those fictional myths of the nation because they serve in the satisfying and stabilizing of society. The artistic languages for a new landscape are found in various art traditions, with several paintings, works on paper, and a video installation 84 Vol. 14 No. 2 Top: Tu Wei-Cheng, Stele in the show bound to the idea No. BM66: Gate of Fleeing Souls, 2007, artificial of classical landscape while also stone, 280 x 555 x 15 cm; Stone No. BM0805—1 and symbolizing the artists’ personal Stone No. BM0805—2, 2008, artificial stone, relationship with the outer world. In 156 x 65 x 100 cm each. Yuan Jai’s Tango II (2010), one can © Tu Wei-Cheng, 2015. Courtesy of National detect the forms of ancient bronzes, Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei.
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