Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Beginning in 2002, the National Palace Museum underwent extensive renovations, making it more visitor friendly and more earthquake-proof. It reopened in December 2006 with an exhibition that included a Song dynasty landscape loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The renovations have captured a newly engaged audience; more than 5 million people visited the National Palace Museum in 2014, and a new southern branch opened in Chiayi County in 2015.

In 2009, China loaned Qing dynasty relics for display in Taipei. In a reciprocal expression of goodwill, National Palace Museum director Chou Kung-shin subsequently refused to exhibit two sculptures allegedly looted from the Summer Palace outside Beijing at the end of the Second Opium War. In spite of this, the Taiwan Palace Museum has refused all loan requests from museums in the People’s Republic of China out of fear that Beijing may refuse to return borrowed art. Loans worldwide are extended only where national law forbids the seizure of disputed property.

Public protest remains vital in Taiwan. In 2013, the White Shirt Army made its first appearances. A movement of Taiwan’s youth, it has refused to take a position on reunification with China. “We don’t support any side or leader,” said Liulin Wei, the thirty-year-old who initiated the movement by posting a note accusing the government of abusing its citizens. “We are for civil rights, common values, democracy. And we made it very simple to join. You just put on a white shirt.” Weeks later, a quarter of a million white-shirted youths marched in Taipei. “People our age are too busy and too turned off by politics,” said Liulin. “But they do care. We just have to make it easier for them to be involved.” Though that movement seems to have faded, in March 2014 hundreds of young activists, dubbed the Sunflower Movement because of the blooms they carried, occupied Taiwan’s Parliament building in an unprecedented protest against a trade pact aimed at forging closer ties with Beijing. The question of unification or independence continues to spool out bewilderingly in a context of calculated vagueness.

TAIWAN

On Each Palette, a Choice of Political Colors

New York Times, August 4, 1996

I became deeply enmeshed in Taiwan’s complex politics and soon discovered the country’s vivid contemporary art scene. I had assumed that Taiwanese new art would be a lesser version of Chinese new art, but what I found was something more interesting than that. The artists I had encountered in China survived an oppressive society via fantasies about freedom; the artists in Taiwan lived in a more free society under constant threat of oppression. Unfortunately, I later found, while everyone in New York wanted to know what was happening in China, few people wanted to know what was happening in Taiwan. The mainland artists have developed a huge international audience, while the Taiwanese artists, many of them equally interesting, have a much smaller place in the international art world.

In 1985, Taipei had fifteen galleries; now it has more than two hundred. Most sell decorative oil paintings in a kitschy impressionist style for bourgeois decorating, but a good number of more serious places exhibit engaged contemporary work in various so-called Western, Chinese, and nativist Taiwanese styles. Taiwan under dictatorship knew just what it was: the Nationalist government of China in exile. Taiwan under democracy cannot decide to what extent it is Chinese, independent, or westernized. The reelection of President Lee Teng-hui confirms the country’s commitment to what our State Department calls “creative ambiguity.” This crisis of identity is reflected in—and, two high government officials told me, partly caused by—the country’s increasingly conflicted art.

You can almost say that to do traditional Chinese brush painting is to support the right-leaning New Party, which favors reunification with the mainland; to do conceptual art is to ally yourself with the left-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favors independence; to do oil painting (almost all dreadful by Western standards) is to tie yourself to the ruling centrist Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT).