text by Hsieh Chia-Yu , Huang Chien-Hung
Trans-fiction
“Trans-fiction” is a cooperating project deriving from Korean time-slip drama and now developing at full swing. Since time-slip drama has always been an important genre in melodrama, especially when it tries to elaborate the impossible in our present life and in the same time to change them in fictional drama. In those time-slip drama, the necessity of slipping time always happens at the point of the impossible of our real social or global situation, thus we could conclude that realizing time-slip drama is how we realize the impossible in real world.
Furthermore, it is always an individual that execute the time slipping in time slip drama, like Somewhere in the Time, 1980, Back to the Future, 1985 and most Korean drama, or some specific groups like Star Trek, 1966/1979. In other words, time slip drama is actually a mirco-fiction that attempting to connect its micro sensible to those realities in a society or larger social scale, which means micro-politics. Although sometimes we could find examples on small groups are sufficient to change the world in these movies, its interaction model still based on the interrelationship between micro and macro environment. Therefore, we could stated that it is not about the time in time-slip drama but how creation surpasses the impossible until chances are shown in the present situation. In this way, a fictional action must be the key of a time slipping.
However, as digital technology and internet era has come, the notion of transition had been more than fictional and mythological time-slipping, but different experiences on cultural perception and information communication. That is to say, the developing of this fictional technology is not being limited on realizing the time travel in these time-slip dramas, but constructing a huge field about traveling through heterogeneous times, via presenting the value conflicts between the contemporary-interpreted of costume dramas and in the modern city dramas. In sum, in order to focus concentratively on the concept of “fiction as action”, we would like to use another word to refer the time slip dramas: trans-fiction.
In its developing, trans-fiction come out in TV shows in 60s, which is Stanley Kubrick’s film from the scrip 2001 A Space Odyssey which he wrote with Arthur Clarke, and its novel published on 1972 with the same name. We could infer that the flourishing of space technology and related space science had inspired many of the creators in the 50s and 60s. The imagination of superluminal velocity and time-space torsion has brought out according to physical hypothesis that nothing can travel faster than light, then it variated with the ideology conflict after the confirmation of Cold War, which is during 1978 and 1979 when China’s reformation and opening and the establishment of Sino-US diplomatic relation and the war between China and Vietnam broke out, and then it bumped into the proceeding global economics deposition. Besides, the space mythology or the Res Politik, built during the cold war, had come into pieces when the Challenger blew up in its launch in front of the world and entered the Ding Politik according to Bruno Latour, then followed with the collapse of Berlin wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, both were not only signified the end of Cold War but opened a new world with multiple cultures and values and the internet world with HTTP techniques.
When the topic of time traveling fall into free trade network, relations between ecosystems and virtual space from mere imagination of space, the trans-fiction is no longer a simple model of traveling through times but a complicated montage by intertwined history and dialectical and interpretational concept. Especially when world trade organizations and free trade agreements were adding fuel to make each areas in the world had been gradually assigned and included to different distribution and sales system, resulting that none of individual or area could live without it and the time travel is no more a pursue for the possible but a challenge to the impossible and trans-fiction a fiction challenging the impossible.
Moreover, the emerge of Wiki has pushed the contradiction between control of language systems and democratic free writing to the extreme. On one hand, Guy Debord’s the merchandise world of replacing the real world had forced us onto the level of consciousness and intelligence leading to a stricter bio-politics era, on the other hand, the universal archiving became a resistance to governance of lives and systematic domination in the same time, that is to say, the manipulation and performance on archives has become the most important form of trans-fiction.
Trans-fiction firstly challenged the systematic duplication in known frameworks, which is a serious illness, or damage, of today, attributing to new economic domination of globalization as well as the prejudice nurtured from OEM system since Cold War. As institutional and systematic repetitions is the impossible that our lives shared in general in East Asian society under bio-politics, trans-fiction has opened an important opportunity in front of the impossible and even created a fictional solution to it.
Micro-archiving under bio-politics
Derrida had mentioned in Mal d’archive (or Archive Fever) that there was a framework when establishing archives, thus an archive itself is a framework to determine writing and production, which would not reveal saliently in the content of text. According to Derrida, archive is a system, a language hidden behind the text, which controls any writing afterwards. Especially in Europe, a place with complete archiving, all the theoretical writing must based on archives, which is resulting to standardized and hierarchical history value, in order to get the right to speak. That is to say, when lacking of archives and modern culture idolatry, how might we based on our experienced facts and collected writings to re-determine methodology? Instead of applying the same methodology that all the places in the world are following and neglecting the fact that there is no archive in Taiwan, how might we develop more possibilities on historical writhing? It is the main response we would make in this research project.
When archive is the framework of historiography, we can conclude that lacking of archives and incapable of archiving causes the lacking of history or fracture of history, the latter is exactly today’s East-Asia situation in general. It makes “how may we form archives in Asia” a huge challenge, when we face numerous heterogeneous materials in different context, and they even had never been organized or categorized. Besides, we can’t just follow western archiving system which is being harshly criticized since 1960s. This is the reason why we call this project trans-fiction, we produce meaning to collect information and vice versa. The methods of the project are combined with three parts, which is bio-politics, the way of history writing, after movements:
1. Bio-politics
1-a. Governance structure under Cold War
On August 15th, 1945, Japan proclaimed their unconditional surrender then World War II ended, as well as Japan’s colonization to Taiwan for about 50 years long. At this time, the conflicting situation between the United States led capitalist countries and the Soviet Union led communists had established based on ideology. Especially after Korean War, a series of out-lying islands in Asia had turned into strategic front for America to stop China’s and Soviet Union’s communism power. In June 1947, US Secretary of State Marshall, European Recovery Program : “The United States should make best efforts to help restore economic prosperity of the world. Unless there will be no political stability and guaranteed peace.” ; On May 20th, 1949, Chiang Kai-Shek retreated to Taiwan, enforced martial law included ban on newspaper, party, etc to restrict people’s freedom which then lasted about 38 years long, which is the longest duration in the world and just the same as those white terror happened in other First Island Chain countries like South Korea, Thailand, Philippine, Indonesia. The United States utilized a variety of military, economic and political means. At first, they cultivated puppet government and dictator in each countries, which could guaranteed some homogeneous between these countries according to the same ideology and values, in order to obtained domestic political control and assimilate the society under vigilance and fears. In the same time, the Untied States established institutions to play roles like friends, big brothers, helpers to these countries in different aspects, which made dictatorship surrendered, in the name of support they accepted policy of anti-communism and disposition of production; thus, The U.S. power had went through the First Island Chain included South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippine, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Under domestic atmosphere of political oppression, “The U.S.” provided dreams to people; in this case, we can conclude that what America did is not just forcing puppet government and dictator to execute terror politics and manipulating ideology, but realizing bio-politics, educated people what kind of life is a better life, resulted that people would choose this kind of life automatically. The United States had stabilized its political structure and international status through bio-politics.
1-b. US-AID as governance of life
In 1948, focusing on recovery of economic after war, The United States started to support Tai-Sugar, Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA), and Tai-power of Taiwan under The China Aid Act of Economic Aid Agreement, as total supporting amount up to four billions USD and regulated that less than one-tenth of the amount should be utilized on Rural Reconstruction Program and to found Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction under America’s command and management. In June 1950, it was the outbreak of Korean War, and later on 1951 The Untied States officially launched supporting program to Taiwan, in the mean while sending the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan Strait and announcing “Taiwan Neutralized” (West enterprise was officially established in Taiwan). Korean War had brought about a critical turning point to Taiwan, when US-AID had divided into three parts as material support, military support, and economic support, and the military support were executed by Department of Defense from the two countries and the economic support authorized by US Economic Cooperation Administration Branch in Taiwan (ECA) in Taiwan. Although the Economic Stabilization Board of Taiwan was formed both by China and America, the above three organization were managed by the US directly and almost equal to a American power execution center in Taiwan. Apparently, regardless of military and politics collaboration, the US-AID had pretty much influence on development of Taiwan from livelihood to industrial technology and even culture, concluding as a comprehensiveness, saying “governance of life”.
Through material assistance and economic military plans, The US-AID had a profound impact on the economic development and politic leaning of Taiwan, as it strengthened the power of ruling party, pleased the landlord class, stripped surplus crops and redirected them to industrial capital and workforce. Then further depressed the price of rice, which caused low-wage working environment in 60s of Taiwan, attributing to America’s ambition of building a economical and cultural dependent system. At this time, Taiwan got rid of colonization of Japan in 50s, but accelerated America’s new model of colonization and made Taiwan once again fall into a subordinate position. To what are the most impressing and typical society scene in Taiwan was the flour’s bags printed with “China and America’s collaboration” were made into open pants for children and wore all around. As a matter of fact, in the capitalized world that is ruled by The United States after war, this was a common historical situation between countries. It were the flour bags and institutions of collaboration at that time, like Commission on Agriculture Reconstruction established during 1948 to 1979 in Nanjing, Shanghai, and Taiwan, made up the meaning and symbol during Cold War around the world. Even though the suppression on thought had already been replaced by manipulation of bio-politics for a long time, and it had immersed into cultural, economical, and technological system, but only until recent years it started being discussed. As Cold War is the former preparation of futuristic systematic art culture, globalized network and creative industry, we presented selected objects from Cold War, especially the flour bags, for this section.
1-c. The Flour’s bags
In these collection from artist Chin Cheng-Te, the shield-shaped sign of “China and America’s collaboration” almost shown in every objects. This sign derived from the year 1948, The U.S. government designed for Marshall’s European Recovery Program, each objects from the program had printed a shield-shaped American country sign and “For European Recovery supplied by the United States of America” on them. After America’s supporting on Europe, they launched support on other countries in Latin America and Asia with the sign changed adequately, just as in Taiwan it became a shield-shaped sign printed with Chinese characters said “China and America’s collaboration,” or “Movie film box of China and America’s collaboration” or “The eagle flour bag” ,for instance. In 1953, they added on a sign showing that The U.S. big brother holding hands with their little brother Republic of China as a symbol of peace, and with the Chinese character of “China and America’s collaboration” moved below the holding-hands sign, like “Wheat bag from the American people” and “The flour bag of food peace movement”. The flour bags are the most significant objects in these collection of US-AID, arising from the land of America almost had no damage during World War II and The U.S. had produced machines for Europe and America’s livelihood in bulk during World War II, which aroused the risk of productivity drop in case of the production line stopped. Moreover, in keeping with usage of farming machine, resulting that the excess of food production which pushed The U.S. to sale all these excess crops with polished reasons after war, which is not only as crops for the supported countries’ people, but for army troops, teachers, officials to gain assistance. We could conclude different levels of implication and historical influence from those times through these flour bags: first of all, we could tell that The U.S. manipulated bio-politic’s network delicately from the evidence of those brands on flour bags; secondly, the flour bags are as competent as other objects to declare that how the empire concerned about bio besides military and politics through their power; last but not least, they had folded their power imprint, ideology, taste and concept of “good life” with living needs, then created a sense of aesthetics.
As this sense of aesthetics is highly related to life, it would directly influenced on the way people developed life experience and thought, and further it cut off their connection from their surroundings and went beyond their local experience, but pointed to “America” as the symbol of modernity, which breaking the continuity of individual’s experience in history and leading to the scatter and breakage of archives. This kind of bio-politics has already become a new model for developed countries to control assisted colonized countries, unlike the death politics that used to suppress and restrain on thought, it the bio-politics combined biological instinct, pursue of taste and universal values then to form a preference of life.
1-d. Anti-communist Martyrs or Spies
Bio-politics was no more a kind of huge state apparatus but a micro starter that motivated individual’s life energy to get indulged with authoritative manipulation, in short, individual’s perceived and experienced facts are replaced with phantasm created by nation-state. Therefore, the existing archives been produced and saved firstly are based on the narratives of national phantasm, on the other hand, individual’s life experience became fragmented and distorted, and their relationship with ideology became somehow coherent but in the same time existed fundamental differences. What’s more, we could found that in this awkward “linked but indifferent" situation, role shifting within one person are often followed with imprints of violence from state.
Before Liu Chi-Hsiung officially started shooting the film, he had concerned and thought about this theme for years and Journey to the Promised Island is the first documentary film he made for research on the topic. In Journey to the Promised Island, he focused on depiction of the main character, Song Chen’s returning back to his hometown and his retrospective narration. What was shown in the film is how an individual was distorted and misled by political regime under specific time and space. It began with listening a political announcement from the radio, which induced an imagination of beautiful life in Taiwan and a plan took about five years with other seven parters, then they sailed to Taiwan in the year 1965, as the mission named “Eight immortals cross the sea” by the government in memory of this anti-communist action for freedom. But all of sudden they were sentenced to jail for rebellion and released from prison until 1972. This one hour work compiled people’s situation during Cold War included people’s perception affected by ideology, individual’s intended effort to flee from govern of ideology, and the cruel and absurd of political regime. The film presented us the effect of bio-politics on individuals with multi-layers of narratives, and how the generated phantasm launched the dynamics of action and destroyed them cruelly by violence of state.
2. Historiographies
During the period of Japan’s colonization in Taiwan, the art education and evaluation system had an enormous change, and this discontinuous and mingled westernization had another important progress under bio-political support from The U.S. during Cold War. Western art history been made an universal or international art history, and a part of compulsory education as traditional Chinese art history. These two systems were built on different paradigms, while Chinese from traditional and Western on modern, which provided two reference or frameworks for Taiwanese art production. Besides, it is really hard for us to anticipate within this mingled art historical context that art production in Taiwan could profoundly drive the development of Taiwan art history. On the contrary, the abstract of these two paradigms compressed the possibility of Taiwan art historiography, when writing necessarily included these different developments and changes from two distinguished cultures. Under this dilemma, which is on one hand being obligatory to learn art history that is totally unrelated to real life experience; on the other hand having difficulty to define a differentiated position in domain of art history, therefore we could only found alternative documents and archiving as art writing when lacking of history.
Under control of authoritarian on historiographies and construction of archives during Cold War in Taiwan, social experience were hardly been revealed in national or governmental archives, what’s worse, culture value were not grown from people’s daily activities but from assignation and recognition from policy; in other words, unless getting permitted, many of the cultural materials were neglected and without appropriate research to edit, rewrite and translate. Therefore, another aspect of archives’ predicament appeared: the anxiety aroused from the vacancy of publicity and historical field, which revealed in individual’s possibility of development in the environment. In this part of research, we concentrated on the period from the 80s to today, or more specifically it’s after the end of martial law and prompted into globalization and advocated internationalization. As a matter of fact that ending of martial law didn’t liberate the consciousness of rights and to support archiving, while forcing on internationalization made a call to the repressed desire when isolated from international society, which is the desire to be avant-garde, and this desire of being avant-grade caused people’s inability to concern about surrounded context, inevitably delayed the process on archiving.
Concerning this development of archive, we focused on micro scale and intertwined archiving activities, which were not directly for the purpose of establishing an institutional archiving but raising various critical attitudes on actual archiving system under the state of lacking archives. In this part we selected three categories to present this critical historiography: when the first one is about space, the IT-Park, the second is on publication, the Art Critique of Taiwan, and third part a personal collection from Yao Jui-Chung.
Archives from IT-Park had been through quite a journey to evolved to its present scale, since its coverage is extremely comprehensive. From its starting point and development and even its appearance now are all highly related to an art community in Taiwan, which was formed during SOCA, a private program on art and esthetics founded Jun T. Lai outsides of academy. After the end of SOCA space, 1986-1987, this community renamed “IT”, to extend and maintain connection of its gathering, then further stretching to meaning of space from their discussions and exhibitions, which happened and documented in the space and became the foundation of archives. Since the types of archives and relationship between archives are determined from production network formed by artists-centered community, resulting that the entrance of database is chronological structure of exhibitions and intertwined with each exhibited artist’s personal creations, exhibition history, related critiques and collaborated curators, further constructed an extremely complicated production network above units that formed by individuals and their relationships.
The second part, ACT, was an academic publication of Tainan National University of Arts, but revised itself to a brand new direction which is profoundly related to archiving in the year 2010. The revision made the magazines focusing on a key man from a specific period or special project then interviewing with them to develop an oral history, and according to the topics in each of them, they invited critics to write about it. In sum, ACT all together to present the historical and philosophically esthetic relationship between critical topics and present art phenomenon. In other words, the ACT based on the Avant-garde contemporary art in Taiwan to develop its way of editing and publishing, and via thematic field research and interviews to construct and produce archives. This kind of archiving provides problematic structures from featured editing in issues, for the sake of giving out implication of contextual relationship between art experiments and history. During these twenty issues of revision, it covered important persons and events from the 60s to 80s, and also combined aspects like image, art history and politics which are beyond the categories of discipline, which is in equivalence to provide a way of archiving from “establishing archives content and information list through thematic research.”
Yao’s “collection” is based on artists’ personal interests, or more strictly, his collecting range and limits could only be understood from the network within his own artistic boundary, which is different from IT-Park that constructed on exhibitions and artists and ACT contemplated and produced archives through thematic projects, interviews and editing. Besides, his indifferent collecting relatively contained a lot of clues that could be stated as in chaos. This chaotic world included several “clusters”: the first is the archive of artist’s own creation, second with how individual artists changed within these twenty years crossed, the third is the development of relative art issues and the presentation of exhibition and performance, the forth is archives on art movements, the fifth is that we could discover some other related experimental publication and clues. We deliberately chose those which are more related to experimental art movement in these collections, they are mainly about underground movements, alternative spaces, exhibition topics, art events, art plans, etc. Through these documents are still in demand of further research to confirm and make it a complete archive, inevitably, they are documents and information that preserved with relatively potential because of the artist’s own openness and distinction.
3. Post-movements
The last part is about present moment and “archiving—movement” that pointing to near future, that is documentation according to present event and action. This way of developing archive that followed with internet era, smart phones and tablets is exactly the situation we must face today. The occurrence and influence of 318 Student Movement in Taiwan is not just a political or social news event, or not even a protest action, but a political turn in social atmosphere under bio-politics. It is not just focusing on those happened events to conclude that whether it creates change and influence or not, but its different conditions and development gave rise to potential effect to the whole society and between generations, for the reason that this experience and situation brought about division on opinions and emotions. However, we would like to know more about how did those experiences been presented, found their position and faced others in the public.
That is to say, the point is not about the body presented on the spot but the position that overview the real situation. Many people began to think about body, space and images after gaining real experience in a real place, and considered about how we face threaten on political economics and instability in actions. How might we preserved passion and potential during the movements for the after? According to our understanding to bio-politics, we could stated that after movements is as important as movement itself. In the era of bio-politics, resistance couldn’t just be a collective action in certain event, it has to ferment continuously in individual’s life beyond the exception state of movement. In order to preserve passion, the production of art became important and a must, since it produced new thoughts and feelings and developed deliberation on the society. As above, we could considered the possibility of documenting art plans and art production, which not only archiving them but files that re-activate culture activities.
We selected three documentation works about 318 Student Movement to discuss on critical archiving, while one of the three is The 561st hour of Occupation from Yuan Goang-Ming, he linked his own creative language with documentation on participation of the movement to provide a presentation of collaborative and conditional video archive. The second works is videos about a forum planned by the participants of 318 Student Movement, which included two one-and-half- hour documentation of the forum. One of which is about the students of the movement invited three participants of social movements, they are speaker of Taiwan March, the executive secretary from Taiwan Alliance for Victims of Urban Renewal, and secretary-general of Taiwan International Workers’ Association, to discuss about the possibility of art in the movement and democracy problems in a movement. The other is about that they invited a art history profession and art critiques, Chen Yu-Ren, to analyze the esthetic in the scene of movements and how do art history research work in the scene respond to social situation. All of above are touched to the issue of how an individual face and participated in an event or movement, and somehow it is exactly the moment that we fight against bio-politics.
------------
2015 Historiography under absence of archive
Interview record: Chen Hui-Chiao ｜ Gong Jow-Jiun ｜ Sing Song-Yong ｜ Chiang Po-Shin |
