Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (31 page)

Some protesters in January spoke of the need for an exhibition in Taiwan of European art, as grand as
Splendors
, that would include everything from the Venus de Milo to
Guernica
. They might want to call such an exhibition
Escaping the Past
, because traditional Western art looks mostly forward (neoclassicism and postmodernism notwithstanding) while traditional Chinese art tends to look back. Emphasis on the future is a point of contention in Taiwan’s politics, and the Palace Museum symbolizes the case against novelty. Exhibitions there tend not to propose new ideas so much as to reveal old ones.

In fact, the surging New Party, which led the protests, advocates eventual reunification, an ultimate means of possessing the past.
The battle over the Palace Museum collection suggests that the next struggle may be over the terms of unification rather than about the sort of wide-eyed independence that has swept Eastern Europe. Like most historical art exhibitions,
Splendors of Imperial China
is about the past. More than most others, it may be about the future as well.

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.

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.

I
n 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).

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.”

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.”

Another day we went to see Hsia I-fu, who paints landscapes in which only the trained Chinese eye can see corrupting traces of Western perspective and some nontraditional contrasts between wet and dry brushwork. “Western painting you go to when you are feeling quiet and it makes you excited,” he said. “Ink painting you visit when you are excited and it makes you calm. Ink painting is closer to religious experience: like a meditation, it purifies the mind. My work itself is not Chinese, not Taiwanese, but from the heart: for in our hearts here, what most of us really want is to be calm; and what you from the West want, and what these young avant-garde artists and DPP people want, I think, is to be excited.” He paused and looked around the room. “Elections; bombing raids; do we need art to excite us, too?”