Daniel Defoe chronicled London's 1665 bubonic plague outbreak in Journal of a Plague Year, which was published in 1722, or 57 years after the epidemic. Artistic reactions to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) have come much quicker.
The SARS Art Project, an Internet-based gallery that's gathered SARS inspired works from around the world, went online between mid and late-May. The project's custodian, Los Angeles-based writer Xeni Jardin, calls it a "collection of digital folk art, or these sort of funny little found images that you sort of stumble across online."
PHOTO COURTESY OF SARSART.ORG
It began, she said, with images by anonymous or unknown creators that were passed around in e-mail chains, then went on to include art she commissioned from professional artists.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SARSART.ORG
Now mostly complete, the online gallery displays a large assortment of images and links to sites and multimedia works, like the satirical, animated monster movie Godzilla vs. SARS (In it, Godzilla faces off with a cloud/monster-bodied SARS virus, defeating it with a breath blast fuelled by American cough syrup). There are also more introspective looks at the disease that originated in affected areas, like Beijing, Toronto, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The first image Jardin got a hold of was Outbreak Girl, a digitized t-shirt design of a raver girl wearing a surgical mask. The source was threadless.com, a Chicago-based t-shirt company.
It was a fitting beginning for what was to become a pure internet event. Jardin posted Outbreak Girl along with a few other images on boingboing.net, an interactive web journal where she's active, and asked for more submissions. It was mid-May, and although the SARS epidemic had been in Asia's headlines for weeks, for Jardin in Los Angeles felt like that was the height of the media hype in the US.
The information channel she was tapping into was that of Web journals, or blogs. The term stems from Web logs and denotes sites mostly by amateur journalists.
Jardin herself is a blogger as well as a professional journalist and in April was involved in a project that brought the two forms together, the war blog of CNN correspondent Kevin Sykes in Iraq. When interviewed by the Taipei Times, she frequently referred to the SARS Art Project as a product of the "blogosphere" and noted how it's drawn from
bloggers worldwide.
Wen Ling (
Wen provided Jardin with digital photos of temperature checks in Beijing, similar to those at most building entrances in Taipei. Simply journalistic, his shots differed from the imaginative digital creations in the online gallery.
Jardin said her project aimed to transcend geography in understanding the epidemic. "Now somebody in Oklahoma or Paris or whatever can get more of a street level feel for what people were seeing and thinking [in affected areas], and that's an amazing thing."
Wen agreed the SARS Art Project was "very good" but said there were too few Beijing contributions.
In a picture of Darth Vader wearing a surgical mask from Florida and ironic illustrations from artists in LA, Washington DC and Vancouver, Wen didn't see much he could relate to. About half of the images in the SARS Art Project were made by North Americans in non-affected areas. "I think a lot of people thought the idea of wearing masks was funny and something to play with. What they didn't realize was that this disease was really terrifying," Wen said.
Works from SARS zones -- about half those included in the project -- often have a different feel. One of the most striking is a photo of a young woman with tan lines from a surgical mask across her face. The outline in skin tones seems to signal a new kind of taboo, as now the face has become a private zone. The connotations are of lost innocence and perhaps even a future of lost identity.
Jardin received the picture in a chain of e-mails she cannot trace back to an original source, but the caption in simplified Chinese characters, "This summer is past" (
If the results are sometimes mixed, it may be because in creating art exhibitions for the blogosphere, Jardin is exploring such new territory. "This is the first time that I'd been involved in a project where we were soliciting the creation of art from the general online public and from digital artists, she said.
Then, by measure of explaining her goals for the new medium, "I went to art school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I come from a family of professional artists. One reason that I became sort of disillusioned or alienated from that world when I was younger is that it felt so separate from the rest of the world. And I wanted to do things with my life that felt more inclusionary."
Though she has not achieved the stature of Defoe's event-defining work, she seems motivated by the same spirit.
The SARS Art Project can be viewed online at http://www.sarsart.org.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would