The project started from a literary hoax on Taiwan of the eighteenth century, and since 2008 I have been working on the story under the title The Museum of George Psalmanazar, MOGP exhibiting in first in Rotterdam, Manchester, Shanghai and Taipei. In the 2012 Taipei Biennial, the project was presented in a manner much similar to that of museum. The current exhibition, MOGP II functions much more like a supplement of the previous work On one hand, I link the secrete path between identity and the politics of fantasy in presenting the real of the local, much as a missing part that is intrinsic to the content.

The book was published by a Frenchman George Psalmanazar when Enlightenment in its nascence. The title The Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa indeed was the first ever Taiwanese historical book which described this Far East island with fantasy and wonders: a cannibal society rampant with serpents, elephants, tigers and bizarre animals. Men lived on the water in the boat house and sailed around. He was a great con artist and even invited to Oxford University to teach Formosan. Although a Caucasian with fair skin and blue eyes, he was a performance artist par excellence. In the second edition of the book, he even spiced everything up: a total savage society with the head-hunting and human sacrifice, even more horrified than the Potlatch. Portraying the image of the savage other earned him a place in the high society of London.

Reading from texts, books and image of the East Asia, Psalmanazzare copied books on Japan and the Southeast Asia to his own. He also saw some images of Taiwan and wrote on the book, and for example what he described “Taiwanese was using a stick in both hand, much like a weapon” was actually referred to a print done from over-hearing a sailor who had travelled to Taiwan. Translation lost and mis-communications were the cultural dimension of knowing us and them. Whenever I read this book I always fantasize all these traffics in the spatial-temporal dimensions of hearing, speaking, reading and writing, full of complexities and differences in a kaleidoscopic vision. To put it bluntly, the fake Taiwanese book can be something of real, and it documents the real of the fictional other. I would even argue that the real Taiwanese book can fall into the same track. The General History of Taiwan done by Lien Heng can be one example in depicting Wu Feng, who sacrifice himself in salvation of the savage Taiwanese aborigines. I still believe that the narrative of history is always haunted by the ghost of the silenced other.

The image included in this exhibition was produced during the time when I was preparing the MOGP and left untreated. In 2012 from the introduction of a friend, Arthur Tsay, I know Lin Guang Rong from Bunun Tribe. He and a dozen of other friends from different tribes such as Ami, Taokas, Rukai, Puyuma all stay in the temporal hut near the seaside, working as the outsourcing labors for the Forest Bureau and living in a tiny space to rest and sleep. They generously feasted us in the aboriginal tradition, and we spend a relax weekend together. When I was about to go, they all wanted me to come back and visited their real home in the mountains. After one year, Lin moved to Taipei with his wife doing the same labor work, and all his friends were long gone. I asked Lin to use his mother tongue to voice the video in reading some savage and deliberately sensational paragraphs of the Psalmanazar’s book. In combining the seemingly impossible fragments of sights and sounds, to link the web of identity politics that lingers between the ancient and the contemporary, the truth and falsity to capture the fleeting moment of the perverse, the primitive, and the empowered to glance the phantom of history.