Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the enormous museum of contemporary art of Taiwan, is a city entity, so its new director was appointed by the DPP mayor of Taipei, who has recently announced plans to build two more museums dedicated to Taiwanese art. At a banquet given by the museum’s director, I was seated next to the director of exhibitions, Lee Yulin, a young woman of singular grace who moves easily between official circles and the world of contemporary artists. I asked her to help me with introductions to a few artists. “I’m DPP,” she said. “I’ll help you if you’ll put forward the case for an independent Taiwan in your article.” A week later, I was seated at a banquet next to Chou Hai-sheng, chief editor at Taiwan’s leading art publishing house. “I’ll make introductions to our great Chinese artists,” he said. “I was there the day the New Party was founded,” he explained.

In Taiwan right now the term ben sheng ren, “people of this province,” refers to the ethnic Taiwanese; the term wai sheng ren, “people from outside,” refers to mainlanders who came over in 1945 and their progeny; and the newly voguish term Taiwan ren, “people of Taiwan,” is the politically correct term that may save the day. Much of Taiwan’s art is about these three modes of self-definition.

The heart of the avant-garde art world in Taiwan is an artist-run gallery called IT Park, founded in 1988 by five friends who felt the need for an alternative space. It is three upstairs rooms, a small, sun-drenched terrace, an office, and a little bar. About forty artists are associated with IT Park, two of whom actually run the place day to day. Artists drift in to look at one another’s work or just to see one another. The conversation is easy, casual. Most of the IT Park artists have studied in the West—at Cooper Union in New York, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and similar institutions. When I stopped in, Dean I-mei, a young conceptualist, was showing a mitten made with a raised middle finger; this in-your-face piece, he said, had been knitted to his specifications by his mother. At lunch, he showed me a canvas with two nearly identical watches nailed to it, both bought in Chinatown in New York. One has the mainland flag for a face, the other, the Taiwan flag. Made in Hong Kong is the title. “Culturally I am Chinese but politically I am not,” said the erstwhile art critic J. J. Shih one night as we sat with our drinks on the balcony at IT Park. Another artist, who calls himself Tchenogramme, put it this way: “I am an international citizen and a Taiwan localist.” The question of whether their art is Taiwanese and why dominates conversation among these artists.

In the seventies, much art embraced the peasant culture of Taiwan and represented the distinctive features of the landscape: “In the seventies, politics was using art; in the late eighties, art started using politics,” explained another young artist, Tsu Ming. “In the seventies, our localism reflected our insecurity around the time we were thrown out of the United Nations; now, our Taiwanism reflects our self-confidence as we move toward complete freedom and great prosperity.” As Lynn Pascoe, until recently director of the American Institute in Taiwan and thereby the US “ambassador” to Taiwan, explained to me, “In 1964, Taiwan graduated from aid; then it rapidly graduated from a rural to a handicraft to a technical economy. For a brief period the rural-handicraft side of the society was its basis, and now it’s a sentimental matter.”

Artists such as the IT Park crowd, educated in the West, have more sophistication than they know what to do with. “Some of us are breaking with Chinese culture; some are breaking with Western culture; some are breaking with their entire past,” said J. J. Shih. “There is underground xenophobia against the West and overt xenophobia against China. But localism is not really nationalism.” Tsong Pu, one of the founders of IT Park, said, “Artists make work about Taiwan’s politics, but their definition of and notion of a political art was learned in American art schools.”

Like most vanguards, this one is full of frustration. The difficulties of “becoming international” often seem insurmountable. “Artists are struggling for a Taiwanese vision, but the struggle is never the subject of the work,” Dean I-mei said. “That’s why the work isn’t interesting to the rest of the world.” Chen Hui-chiao, an artist who makes formalist-minimalist installations with needles and steel and water, said, “Don’t look at my work and think about Taiwan. Just look at it. It’s just art.”