Beautiful island. Lost paradise. Strongroom of Chinese treasure. Sentinel against Gargantua across the water. Mountain of gold. Dragon economy. Diplomatic orphan.
Contemporary culture in Taiwan arises from a time-and-place intersected by contending historical narratives, geopolitical mappings and cultural affiliations, where nation-building strategies have succeeded only in producing noisy dissent about what might constitute culture or nation. The society’s storytellers – artists, filmmakers, writers and critics – project cacophonous tales about themselves to a double audience of insiders and outsiders. While no individual artist’s work can be categorised solely according to the place and time of its production, the art of contemporary Taiwan can nevertheless be grouped under the banner of a twisting, fantastic and polemical set of stories, mutually dependent, mutually antagonistic, in which creative making is tied inextricably to specific, yet always disputed circumstances.
Indigenous Taiwan, named Formosa, the Beautiful Island, by colonising Europeans, became the offshore refuge of Ming loyalists from southern China when the Manchus invaded the Chinese heartland from the north in the seventeenth century. Two centuries later the Manchu collapse, hastened by the depredations of Western powers, led to Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Japanese defeat in the second world war brought Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to take over the island as a base for their claim to govern China. When the United States and other countries recognised the People’s Republic of China in 1976, diplomatic isolation followed for the rival Republic of China and the quest for ‘local soil’ Taiwanese identity intensified. By the 1980s Taiwan had become an economic powerhouse, following Japan to ‘developed-nation’ status, yet without Japan’s strong national form. From 1987 Taiwan has pursued a rough-and-tumble democracy in which Nationalist rule has become less secure and the movement for ‘independence’ from mainland China has grown. The mainland Chinese Communist Party reserves the right to use force to ‘recover’ the renegade province of Taiwan, while the Nationalists on Taiwan sit prepared to wait for the collapse of the ‘bandit’ communist regime across the straits before ultimately ‘retaking’ the motherland. Much of this must seem like dream or nightmare to the majority in Taiwan who identify their long-term future as simply Taiwanese, and who realise that, if they are to have a future at all, the stories they tell must contain arguments for political, social, environmental and cultural transformation.
From early times, creative spirits in Taiwan have grouped together to make alternative blueprints to occupation, authoritarian assimilation or marginality, working obliquely in art and literature when to be explicit was impossible. ‘What the artist felt, what the philosopher thought, and what the patriot dreamed of, were all put into song by the poet,’ writes one historian in reference to the dynamic role of literary gatherings in the evolution of civil society from late-seventeenth-century Taiwan onwards. In the late-twentieth century, Taiwanese artists, while jealous of their individual trademarks in the vigorously competitive critical and commercial marketplace, continue to position themselves in groups according to lineage, locality, training (including overseas experience) and ideology.
The stories that artist Huang Chin-ho tells about himself and in his work, for example, are as pointed as they are entertaining. Born in 1956, Huang Chin-ho describes himself as thirteenth-generation Taiwanese, from a family that migrated from Fujian in southern China three hundred years ago – and perhaps with some hypothetical Dutch blood. He speaks Taiwanese or minnanyu, the dialect of Fujian. He shares the distinctive, popular Taoist/Buddhist spirituality of Taiwan. In paintings such as Journey to Paradise and Garden of Earthly Delights, he draws on Taoist symbols and colours against a philosophical background of Buddhistic detachment from material desires and physical passions. In Chiayi in west-central Taiwan, where Huang Chin-ho was born, the incoming mainland Chinese Nationalists were especially severe in their attempts to annihilate local opposition. The memory of the 28 February 1947 ‘incident’ and the subsequent White Terror, in which an estimated 50,000 people were killed throughout the island, was a catalyst for the development of Taiwan consciousness among the population of the area.
Huang Chin-ho was initially self-taught as an artist. Failing to get into art school, he studied philosophy and history, developing a special interest in Taiwan’s history. Painting came later. In the early 1980s he was an abstract expressionist and in the later 1980s moved on to neo-expressionism; by 1989 he had achieved his ambition to work in New York. It was in New York, far from Taiwan, that he realised that the art he most passionately wanted to produce was inseparably bound with Taiwan itself. In 1990 he left New York and returned to Taiwan to embark on his quest for a new, locally generated style. In a series of remarkable paintings from 1990 on, Huang Chin-ho has used local elements and materials to articulate a Taiwanese aesthetic that is different from China’s and different from prevailing modes in the West. Part horrifying, part celebratory, these works show the newly prosperous denizens of Taiwan in a world of exuberant grossness and garish transformation. Traditional symbols, such as peaches (for longevity), sugarcane (for good luck) and lotus leaves, jostle with the imitation-classical façades of karaoke bars and strip clubs in exquisitely painted garden settings where humble cabbage grows in the foreground and overweening power lines soar behind. The artist talks of Taiwan’s ‘migrant’ and ‘colonised’ culture as having produced a flamboyant, ostentatious aesthetic, a brash ersatz rococo which, for all its intense physicality, expresses the pathos of untrammelled or unachievable psychological and spiritual desires and states.
Huang Chin-ho is engaged in a kind of striptease himself, peeling the clothes off his fleshy figures to show them empty of soul underneath, or lacking head and heart. In Journey to Paradise, he seems almost to peel the skin itself off the famous singer who has ended up working the meat markets. Elsewhere he exposes the hybrids of a crossover society, pumped-up beasts in bikinis, robots with dictator faces, transsexual, hermaphrodite, party animals all crossdressed-up with no place to go. In these wild, warning scenes, the artist is concerned with the meaning of Taiwan’s history, the consequences – especially for the environment – of Taiwan society’s materialism and pragmatism, and, fundamentally, with a contemplation of human existence in which the world of spirits hovers, perhaps trapped, within the fiery, brightly coloured world of passion and mortality.
Narrative elements are no less present in the work of other contemporary Taiwan artists, whether it is the retelling of political histories, conversation pieces, fantasy illustrations, esoteric story-fragments or Zen diary entries. Hong Kong gallery director Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, one of the first observers to mediate Taiwan’s new art for an outside audience, identifies the inscriptive impulse in a number of Taiwan artists as ‘a continuous, often unconscious exploration of the self in relation to environment or family, as though the artists are unsure of their own “shapes” and need to define themselves through a re-constitution of a familial or environmental world’. Looking ‘at Asian countries newly liberated economically’, Chang sees ‘a growing self-awareness. With this will inevitably come an art which attempts to re-align one’s orientation in the world from an individual perspective. Speaking generally, the need for constant re-affirmation of one’s local identity will also grow with an increasingly shifting, fast-moving world.’
In this sense, localism is also a global phenomenon, and Australians can readily find points of contact between Taiwan’s cultural situation and our own. The comparison was not lost on the early historian of the island, an Australian himself, whose rhetoric transfers with prophetic quaintness to 1995. In Formosa: A Study in Chinese History (1966) W.G. Goddard writes of
a striking similarity between the making of this Formosan character and that of the Australian … In both cases the toll of life and labour’s enterprise was terrific … In both cases another element, this time human, entered into the struggle to intensify it and add to the casualties … Historians have recorded the lawlessness that resulted, but out of the struggle … developed that spirit of independence and that love of freedom, so characteristic … [and] also, perhaps, that resentment against authority.
This, of course, is merely another story. It remains to tell how later generations are revising it. Now, at any rate, Taiwan’s contemporary culture can speak to us with surprising, if partially deceptive, directness. Its quite particular energies and exuberance are unexpected, fascinating, and even, perhaps, like the gilded temples that are sprouting like mushrooms all over the Beautiful Island, inspirational.
1995