Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Art Histories of a Forever War is an exploration of modern art in postwar Taiwan and its enduring resonances. To understand this historical milieu, the exhibition unpacks and contextualizes Taiwan's modern art as part of a Cold War convergence of art, design, and technology.1 On a global scale, and in relation to the American military-industrial complex and its attendant neo-imperialism (Immerwahr 2020: 13–144), the post–World War II and early Cold War period of the 1940s–60s has been described as “a period of accelerated commercialization, of decolonization and—in the context of advanced aesthetic practice and thought—of considered reassessment of the effects and legacies of the modernist avant-garde” (Martin 2005: 4). Modernity in this period was transformed by wartime techno-scientific developments and the competition for cultural supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union.From the design of boardrooms to visual anthropology to cultural exchange programs based on the belief that art could be a medium for building diplomatic understanding, cultural production in this period was motivated by an interest in shaping human subjectivity. While pertinent to American art history,2 these policies had a global effect: the Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union to ideologically determine what progress and modernity meant for the world had an effect on how these ideas were employed in campaigns to win “hearts and minds” (Krenn 2005). In this way, the exhibition's reference to the Cold War is not a simple periodization demarcating the period after World War II; instead, the Cold War symbolizes a worlding process of imaginatively and technologically modulating oneself as part of an international competition to define what was “modern.”To further elaborate, we unpack the argument via three interconnected sections of the exhibition. “Cosmotechnics after Space” interrogates the specific cosmotechnics of modern art practices in Taiwan in light of the technological developments that arose out of the space race, such as satellite photography and the moon landing. Cosmotechnics, a term coined by philosopher Hui Yuk, refers to the unification of moral and cosmic orders through craft or art making.3 In this view, art practices, like tools and technology, do not just produce things but are world-making processes.“Global Domestic” focuses on the emergence of a shared global experience mediated through home appliances and crafts. This thread takes an expanded view of how art and craft from Taiwan, supported by American economic aid as a strategy to strengthen Taiwan's economic development and to develop them for export, contributed to the construction of a “global domestic.”“Aesthetic Networks of a Free World” examines the internationalization projects of Taiwan's modern artists in this period. The free world, a phrase often used in propaganda, refers to the Western bloc and the network of countries allied with the United States. The Republic of China in Taiwan, being the “free face of China,” represented one of the front lines of the Cold War. This geopolitical position afforded artists in Taiwan exceptional opportunities to develop their artistic practices across the free world, and it colored the reading and development of aesthetic movements associated with artists from Taiwan. Even as the US Information Service advocated for art communities in Taiwan and championed them as the “ideal” Chinese modernism internationally, Taiwan's modern artists navigated these opportunities. They developed their own international communities and definitions of modern art.For instance, the exhibition illustrates this point with several canonical works from the Punto International Art Movement (fig. 9), including Li Yuan-Chia's Untitled 16 (1963), Untitled 17 (1963), and Untitled 18 (1963). Produced during Li's engagement with Punto International Art Movement in Italy, these three folding-scroll pieces embody Li's integration of the “spatial and temporal freedom of Western abstract” with his training in Chinese calligraphy, especially in his use of brushstrokes (Hsiao 1991: 358). This body of work has been well received and discussed by art communities in Taiwan. While the exhibition explores Taiwan's modern art through these three distinct threads, it is essential to keep in mind that these themes are to be read in terms of conjunctural dynamics. Cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey's (2010: 57) notion of conjuncture refers to a “period during which different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape,” producing a crisis. By situating these themes within a conjunctural analysis, the exhibition promotes an examination of the complex entanglements of this historical period and privileges the agency of the artist in navigating their sociopolitical context and writing history on their own terms.Nowhere is this curatorial approach of intervening into a global history of a “forever war” more apparent than in the reappearance of several artists across themes. These artists include Chin Sung, Han Hsiang-Ning, Yang Yuyu, Lee Shi-Chi, and Chen Chi-Kwan. The inclusion of work from different moments in their artistic career not only facilitates an expanded art-historical reading of their individual artistic evolution but also renders visible the conceptual ties between themes. This is exemplified by the double bill of Chen Chi-Kwan in “Cosmotechnics after the Space Race” and in “Global Domestic.”4 The first, Ninety-Degree Curves (1967), depicts Chen's memory of a flight during his military service in 1944. This nearly two-meter-long ink painting actualizes an aerostatic vision through classical Chinese ink painting techniques. It offers a poetic counterpoint to the scientific visuality represented by the reproductions of NASA photographs and posters displayed in the same gallery.“Global Domestic” features Chen's Yin Yang No. 2 (1985), a 5.5-meter-long painting mounted in the format of a hand scroll that resembles an imaginary journey into a siheyuan (Chinese courtyard house) in Yunnan.5 Unlike traditional Chinese landscape painting, which emphasizes the exteriority of a scene through elaborate brushwork and composition, Yin Yang No. 2 actualizes an interior structure that is both physical and metaphysical. The painting is meant to be viewed from left to right, situating the domestic as a microcosm of the wider world, and thus extending the visual narrative of traditional Chinese ink painting. On the one hand, the painting encapsulates how the correlation between spaces in a siheyuan epitomizes the social order of traditional Chinese society by demarcating spaces with symbolic household items without merely relying on walls. On the other hand, by situating the interior of the siheyuan between mountains and lakes, Chen creates a synchronicity between the domestic rhythm of time expressed by the unfolding spaces of the siheyuan and the cosmic passage of time embodied by the flowing water and the sun and moon. The shifts in how Chen employed modern perspectives, from the aerial to the domestic layout, in his attempts to represent worlds speak to generational shifts and the enduring resonances of this historical period on how artists, such as Chen, saw and depicted this milieu in their works. Beyond just privileging the agency of the artist and the historical context in which they work, such a curatorial approach allows for a larger, more expansive historical scale through which to consider Taiwan's modern art as a lens onto a moment in global history—a moment that still resonates in our contemporary lives.A week before the opening of Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home (2021) at the Taipei Fine Art Museum (TFAM), the heightened tension between the Republic of China in Taiwan (ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) played out in the global news cycle. With the failure of the democracy movement in Hong Kong, the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and US president Joe Biden vowing to defend Taiwan, current events in the weeks leading up to the exhibition promised the revival of the Cold War tensions represented in the exhibition. Thus the specter of the Cold War uncannily formed a backdrop to the opening of Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home, an exhibition that explored and historicized the artistic pursuit of modernism in Taiwan and its neighboring regions from the 1950s to the 1970s (Hunnicutt 2021).The location of TFAM, in this light, exaggerated the historicity and timeliness of the exhibition. Opened on August 8, 1983, TFAM is Taiwan's first purpose-built exhibition space for modern art.6 Located at the former site of the United States Taiwan Defense Command,7 TFAM's founding vision and its mandate to develop a national collection made it a house of modernism and a literal by-product of the Cold War. The museum embodies the confluence of Taiwan's aesthetic aspiration to modernism at the tail of the martial law era and a Cold War military and industrial complex that produced global modernism.Considering this larger context, this article is a curatorial reflection on the exhibition, Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home (2021), as a cultural object that was a product of the Cold War—in being commissioned by and being sited at TFAM—as much as it was an interrogation of the Cold War in Taiwan. 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Authors: Kathleen Ditzig, Fang-Tze Hsu
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4387786989