text by Manray Hsu
Taiwanese Contemporary Art Since 1980
People are products of their time, but only some become faces that tell what time it is. These are people who face up to their historical situation with great sensitivity. With the advent of the industrial revolution, time has changed faster than ever before in human history. In the late 1970s, Taiwan reached the post-industrial stage of economic and social development in which globalised mass media and consumerism dominated the daily affluent life of Taiwanese. In the midst of the political turmoil of democratisation and the collapse of the Cold War world structure, Taiwan in the 1980s became the fertile ground of neo-Marxism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonial and cultural movements, as well as ben-tu, the second wave of nativism. It is out of this cultural milieu that contemporary art emerged. In less than two decades, Taiwan has already produced two generations of contemporary artists. They are cultivated by their own particular situation and sensitively respond to it; becoming faces of their time.
The First Generation
The distinction between these two generations can roughly be drawn in terms of age. The first generation was born in the mid-1940s to late 1950s; the second after 1960. The first generation did not go through the World War Two, but lived in its aftermath. They were educated under the Cold War ideology, with an authoritarian regime indoctrinating their people against the evils of communism. They experienced the transition from an agricultural to a commercial society, tasting the fruits of the early Economic Miracle. The Kuomintang (KMT) Party adopted policies that suppressed native Taiwanese culture and people in favour of those who came with the Party in the 1949 retreat from Mainland China and who were the minority in Taiwan.
This situation changed when the hsiang-tu movement arose in the 1970s, which affirmed the importance of the local. As the first nativist movement in recent Taiwanese history, it affected most artists who emerged in the 1980s. Among themselves, these artists did not distinguish between native Taiwanese and Chinese Mainlanders. They simply identified themselves as Taiwanese, and while sympathising with the nativist movement, cried out for cultural pluralism in both societal and artistic aspects. Installation, multi-media works, performances- everything became possible. In the late 1980s, a new wave of Taiwanese cinema and a radical "small theatre" movement emerged, in which artists in the second generation, such as Wang Jun-Jieh, Chen Chieh-Jen and Yao Jui-Chung partook in their formative years. A second important trend, as opposed to the first nativism (which was in most cases nostalgic for a pastoral and agricultural past), was the development of socio- political critique: of the materialism of consumer society and the authoritarian ideology. Such art was accepted as emblematic of a modernised, self-critical society and gained its persuasive forces from the pro-democratic, social movements which promoted gender, environmentalism, aboriginal and special rights.
Another influencing factor for the first generation was the development of the art institutions: art colleges, museums and local cultural centres, artist organisations, and the emerging, commercial art market. Though museums were responsive to new art, contemporary artists still found the museum dominated by the authoritarian regime, a site of bureaucracy from which they had to break away. They organised and mobilised whatever resources were at hand to make exhibitions inside and outside of the museum. The most important among them were the 101 Contemporary Artists Group (founded 1982), the Studio of Contemporary Art (SOCA, 1986), IT Park (1988), and Space 2 (1989), which in its tenth-year anniversary is still thriving.
The Political and Cultural Background in the 1990s
In the 1990s three major factors played a role in drastically changing contemporary Taiwanese art. First, the democratic reform movement turned into party politics which absorbed the forces released by the social movements of the 1980s, which became pro-capitalist and populist. Disillusioned about this development and with the absence of a powerful leftist party, politically concerned artists turned to the micro-politics of the body, identity, gender, environment, and community, and enlisted various political resources, including parties, to serve the cause. Of course, not all artists adapted to the new political situation in this way. Many of them became apathetic and cynical. Others continued to marginalise themselves and pursue the avant-garde way. These include members of IT Park and New Paradise (founded 1993-4), and other individuals such as Wang Jun-Jieh, Lin Chun-Ju and Chen Chieh-Jen. In the early 1990s, a second Taiwanese nationalist (ben-tu) movement emerged which differed from the first nativism in that the first was mainly a cultural movement, closely linked to the 1970s pro-democratic movement. Like most nationalist ideologies around the world, the Taiwanese version is extremely complicated and requires both courage and historical distance to understand. The new nativist movement, which surfaced soon after the lifting of martial law (1987), became the dominant ideology in almost all sectors of the country. The museum simply reflected this dominant ideology and organised several historical exhibitions, such as "Three Hundred Years of Taiwanese Art" and "A Retrospective of the Western Influences on Early Taiwanese Art", and the "New Faces of Taiwanese Art 1945-1993". These and similar exhibitions, welcomed and supported by the government, effectively canonised the artists from older generations and promoted them in the art market. As nativism obtained its hegemonic status, it also dominated the discourse of art criticism. This lasted until 1997 or so and continues to survive in those circles which identify themselves as the mainstream.
The third factor paradoxically reversed the second one: at the peak of nativism, there arose the call for internationalisation. It should be noted that the call for internationalisation was not limited to people who were opposed to narrow nativism and its political and commercial implications. As part of the global art scene, contemporary artists consider themselves to embody the new trend of globalisation, and also the canonised, conservative modern artists and their followers, who control the resources to exhibit abroad (though are sometimes ignored by the active global art world).
The Second Generation
Artists born after 1960 experienced these rapid changes in their formative years and are usually labelled the "new new Humans", or Generation X. Despite the obscurities, the use of these terms points to the fact that a new generation has appeared within a short period of time. Taiwan has come to an age of speed: industrialisation and urbanisation occurred in thirty to forty years, rather than the two hundred years as it did in Western countries. That Taiwan's pace of change is synchronising with the rest of the world is chiefly due to a new stage of globalisation which, according to Arjun Appadurai, involves five disjunctive dimensions of global cultural flow: created by people, technology, finance, the media, and ideas.1
Growing up in this environment, the "new new Humans" have adjusted to the hybridised and rootless character of values, world-views, and identities. While the older generations felt "up-rooted" by the loss of tradition during modernisation, the new generation seem to experience the situation as a normal, constant "rootlessness", and they develop a capacity for "floating" and "vertigo".
Furthermore, contemporary media has somehow produced a world which Baudrillard called "hyper-reality", in which the real can be characterised as a copy of the virtual. Faced with this hyper-reality, and the uncertainty it generates, people who grew up with the belief in the clear distinction between the real and the virtual feel anxiety; whereas the "new new Human" seems to find room for playfulness and irony in the instabilities of this situation. Especially things such as "history" and "identity," which are highly contested by powers that claim "truth", become dubious and consequently are treated by the new generation with witty scepticism. Another characteristic of the second generation lies in their attitude toward consumerism. They tend to perceive fetishism, fashion, emptiness, and depression in a "cool" way: by regarding them as quite inevitable and hence neutral to the happiness of life, reflecting on them in relation to mortality, meaningfulness, and spirituality.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new generation is their growing sense of belonging to a global art world. This has to do with the increasing inclusiveness of the contemporary art scene, and with the Taiwan government's support for internationalisation. The artists do not only see themselves as living in more than one culture, but also in what theorists such as Mike Featherstone called "Third Cultures".2 Third Cultures are being generated basically by professionals practising in the global flow of people involved in technology, finance, media and ideas. They share a "mediating" function in cross-border communication. However, this does not imply that they have the same interests, nor that they believe in the Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism, nor that they see a homogenous, unified future world culture as desirable. Most artists, activists, and some intellectuals stand out because of their open minded, cosmopolitan attitude towards communication, while anticipating a diversified, egalitarian cultural scene. In general, they see globalisation as making synchronic, centreless percussion throughout the world, the future of which depends on the diverse responses from different cultures. Such an idealist attitude is inherent in most international exhibitions and cultural exchanges, and as the younger Taiwanese artists participate more in such occasions, they will develop a stronger sense of membership in the "Third Cultures", or to be more specific, in the emerging internationalism.3
Conclusion: Containment of Contemporary Art and Other New Challenges
By including more non-Western artists in the international art scene, the revision of the modern art canon and the artist's new identity as a world citizen, shall not distract us from the present difficulties, if not crises, of contemporary art. Crudely speaking, capitalism witnessed its triumph after the end of the Cold War. It seems that, at least in industrialised countries, art has never been so welcome by society and the state because it is a symbol of civilisation, modernisation, and democracy. Even the most critical, subversive art is to a great extent accepted as a sign of freedom - as long it is labelled "Art". This situation. has been confronted by many Taiwanese artists, when they experienced, within a very short period of time, authoritarianism and the struggle for democracy, nationalism, consumerism and urbanisation, the institutionalisation of art, and finally, the virtual reality of information. Besides the general "containment" of art which is a world-wide phenomenon, Taiwanese contemporary artists have to meet further "site-specific" challenges. Since 1995, more artist organisations and associations have come into existence than ever before and have set themselves the task of reforming the cultural environment. Governments at the national and local levels are establishing more cultural units and regulations, including the Ministry of Cultural Affairs which will be set up in 2000. Public art, environmental art, site-specific outdoor installations, community art, as well as Internet art, are burgeoning rapidly as governments, cultural foundations, and various urban and community activist organisations have found the relevance, or usefulness, of contemporary art. And all these institutional changes are happening at a flashing speed. Artists now have to be able to respond to the fast transformation of their time, if they want to become faces of the Zeitgeist. They have to adjust to the fact that they may only have fifteen minutes before time washes its face to apply another layer of make-up. Aware of the cunning nature of History (Hegel), one has to put up with time's grimace and learn to play the fox.
Notes:
1. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 7, Sage Publications, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi, 1990
2. Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Olobalisation, Postmodernism and Identity, Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 1995
3. Jean Fisher, ed. Global Vision: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, Kala Press, London in association with The Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994
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