text by Hou I-Ting
Taiwanese culture embraces characteristics from a variety of cultural influences, including a refined culture brought to the island from the southern provinces of China towards the end of the Ch’ing Dynasty, the cultural practices of the indigenous community, and thrifty Hakka habits. As the Japanese occupation marked the beginning of modernization for Taiwan, the transplanted cultural influence emerged as an encompassing westernization of Japanese style on education, fashion and architecture.
For the typical Taiwanese family at the time, the father would wear a western-style suit; the mother would sport the traditionally Chinese wide-lapel blouse of the late Ch’ing Dynasty-early Republic era and embroidered shoes on bound feet, while occasionally spicing up the ensemble with a Japanese-style long skirt and hair decorations in the Han or Manchurian styles. The children typically wore Japanese traditional garb with touches of Chinese and western styles while walking on flip-flops. Taiwan is such a land of postcolonial characteristics that it is able to fuse cultures from all over the world and alchemize a sense of localness in the process. This is a new localness born of contemporary interpretation, and a positioning of subjectivity.
Bopiliao (which literally translates to “peel-skin-shack”) is the name of a location, but under the artist’s revision (replacing the written character of liao with a similarly formed character of the same sound, meaning “to cure a disease” or “treatment”), it is transformed into a new noun connoting a trend of dressing up. After breaking the term apart, one can see that bo suggests an act of divesting or casting off, pi implies a surface layer, and liao alludes to treatment and renewal. The artist attempts to reestablish a new school of aesthetics through deconstruction, a kind of chemical peel for art. She hopes to re-contextualize the life and fashion of women in the western districts of Taipei City from an earlier era through the viewpoint of a woman riding the unstoppable wave of globalization and the age of fashion, while presenting a cultural multiplicity by integrating different images of femininity from diverse cultures throughout history.
The timeline under review begins with the late Ch’ing Dynasty-early Republic period, through the Taiwanese retrocession era, and all the way to the present. All the relevant elements, from Japanese cultural inundation during the Japanese occupation and retrocession era, early Taiwanese (Hokkien) folk colors, to contemporary media-fed information frenzy and the rise of feminist discourses via the route of fashion, have become malleable under the artist’s hand. She molds an impression of the almost-forgotten airs and styles of the traditional Taiwanese woman, re-transforms the impression through the lens of a contemporary aesthetic, and extracts a brand-new sense of style expressed in a concentration of space and time. The artist works with recent fashion history from Japanese occupation to the present, and combines the data with the early-day fashion industry of the Menga District and trendy elements of contemporary fashion industry. She selects sites the women of earlier times frequented, such as the market or the teahouse, and confronts such public sites with a sort of exhibitionism of the body: in locations such as Bopiliao, she shows off/models the styles of Taiwanese woman from past to present with an extremely modern set of postures, combining characteristics of contemporary and traditional women. The traditional craft of embroidery is applied to the surface of digitally-produced images, implying an attempt to return to human warmth and handicraft while using a cold, technological interface. The style of the embroidery is the artist’s attempt at bringing a forgotten tradition back into fashion through a collage treatment of traditional fashion elements. |
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