Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The contemporary art market in Taiwan is weak right now, and about 90 percent of galleries operate at a loss. “The problem,” explained Lily Lee, director of the Gallery Association and owner of the Dragon Gate Gallery, “is that prices became very inflated at the dawn of the museum era, when the Taipei Fine Arts Museum was established and everyone began fussing about Taiwanese art. And then it turned out that the secondary market was unpredictable and that our art hadn’t really gone international. Chinese people don’t like this kind of unstable investment.” So while the development of a contemporary-art world is key to Taiwan’s continuing struggle for cultural identity, the manufacture of art is increasingly marginalized by its unprofitability.

A five-minute cab ride away from IT Park is the New Paradise, another artist-run space. The New Paradise is nonprofit, windowless, in a basement, with no chic coffee bar and no balcony for philosophers to sun themselves. The audience here is even smaller and more self-referential, the work even more sophisticated and isolated. In one piece, all the clocks are set at 2:28, lest we forget the two-two-eight events (the Taiwan massacres of February 28, 1948), heroic background to Taiwanese nationalism.

As Lee Yulin of the Fine Arts Museum and I set out to see her boldly Taiwanese artists, we talked about the delicate pragmatics of an independent Taiwan that would be born of the vision of artists. “Taiwanese orthodoxy rejects the Chinese past, but our new identity will in fact be half discovered and half created,” she said. “We cannot throw away the Palace Museum and our Chinese heritage, for that is an important part of modern Taiwan. The problem is to include our Chinese past but also distinguish ourselves from it. Culture is a thing that accumulates; you can’t just start a new culture right now. It has to be based on the past.”

In the studio of Wu Tien-chang, we discussed what he calls “the passenger mentality of the KMT”; that the Nationalist government came to Taiwan only to pause before reconquering the mainland. “Everyone comes here expecting to go away again,” he said. “We have no superhighways because the KMT didn’t think it was worth building them because they expected to leave as fast as possible. This island is full of fancy buildings made of plywood. Nothing has a real base, no real roots. We in Taiwan are so accustomed to this fakeness that we accept it as real. We have to change that.” He gestured at his Self-Portrait as a Sailor, the colors eerie, the light artificial, the scenery hilariously kitsch. “Everything in my work is fake because that reflects the social reality of this island.”

Later that night, we sat in a garden—we were outside the congested center of Taipei, and this one-story house looked as if it had materialized out of a scroll painting—with Huang Chih-yang and his wife, watching the moon rise over the city and drinking tea and eating pumpkin seeds. His work is hauntingly beautiful, employing the techniques of Chinese brush painting to make conceptual installations. “When I was beginning art school,” he explained, “I decided to study Chinese art because to me at that young age all Western art looked the same. I knew I wanted to do something new, and I didn’t think there was anything new to be said in Western media.” Maternity Room, one of his most spectacular pieces, has more than a dozen hanging lengths of rice paper with life-sized ink pictures of skeletal figures, their sexual organs exaggerated and aestheticized, half-human and half-monstrous. “Why is it thought that to be modern and to be Chinese are artistically alien ideas? I am after the truth of this mad, mixed society,” he said.

I went with the editor Chou Hai-sheng to see Shia Yan, one of the great old men of art in Taiwan, an oil painter whose work looks derivative and banal to the Western eye but whose retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum last year was a blockbuster. “An artist learning Western art has a plan to improve Chinese art with Western,” Shia Yan said. “This philosophy only damages the tradition and does not reconstruct it at all. Perhaps at best it is possible to bring together Chinese feeling and Western form.”