Taiwan is not a utopia, or a dystopia. It's not a place. Diplomatically it has no space. Politically it does not exist. We can't even agree on its name.
Even so, its presence will be felt at the 52nd Venice Biennale in Italy next month, when six artists from the "nation without nationality" will be exhibiting their works.
The theme of the entry is Atopia and refers not only to the political position that Taiwan finds itself in, but also a 21st-century condition that applies to us all.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ARTISTS
"Atopia refers to the situation of post-colonialism we are in. There has not been much time to become a country. Many other places are like this, nations without nationality," curator Hongjohn Lin (林宏璋) said yesterday at a press conference introducing Taiwan's Venice Biennale entry.
"Atopia" features work from the auteur Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), photographer Lee Kuo-min (李國民), video director Tang Huang-chen (湯皇珍), bricoleur Huang Shih-chieh (黃世傑) and comic-book artist VIVA.
The range of artists chosen makes it a colorful as well as a challenging show that peers into the abyss to explore the concept of Taiwanese-ness.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ARTISTS
Lin has borrowed the term atopia from the German sociologist Helmut Willke, who defines it as a non-place, or society without borders.
Globalization, multinational companies and the Internet are creating a world in which international markets, non-governmental organizations and multi-culturalism erase the relevance of nationhood.
Lin has adapted the term for his own purpose and localized it. The artist, academic and drummer said that Taiwan was an "atopian state par excellence."
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ARTISTS
It is not recognized as a state by most countries because of pressure from China, which claims it as its own. Even so, it has its own government and is a powerful economy.
Taiwan's identity is so amorphous it's name keeps changing, Lin said. When it competes in the Olympics it is called Chinese-Taipei. Officially it is the Republic of China, but this technically refers to the state formed in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), the "father of modern China."
Putting politics, sociology and names aside, Atopia captures the flavor of Taiwanese contemporary art in all its diversity.
Tsai Ming-liang's film installation Is It a Dream? is said to be "like a sculpture in time" and is set in a fading cinema in Malaysia, which refers to the golden age of flim and its current malaise. There is also a theme of displacement, which ties in with atopia.
Lee Kuo-min is a photographer who has documented disappearing lives, such as Treasure Hill and the Losheng Leprosarium, by taking pictures of people's living accommodation. They are intensely personal but also represent a contemporary reality.
Tang Huang-chen has explored the theme of personal memory in her video; while Huang Shih-chieh's bright technological inventions propose a vision of the future that is both humorous and slightly unsettling.
The comic artist VIVA explores the idea of copying other countries' culture and making it one's own. A series of cartoons (with translations by former Taipei Times reporter David Frazier) are memorable for their glocalized messages.
The Venice Biennale was first held in 1895 and is one of the world's major contemporary art exhibitions.
"Atopia" opens in the Taiwan Pavilion, at the Palazzo delle Prigioni in San Marco, Venice, Italy, from June 10 to Nov. 21. See www.labiennale.org.
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
In the run-up to the referendum on re-opening Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant last month, the media inundated us with explainers. A favorite factoid of the international media, endlessly recycled, was that Taiwan has no energy reserves for a blockade, thus necessitating re-opening the nuclear plants. As presented by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, it runs: “According to the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, 97.73 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, and estimates are that Taiwan has only 11 days of reserves available in the event of a blockade.” This factoid is not an outright lie — that
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) yesterday paraded its military hardware in an effort to impress its own population, intimidate its enemies and rewrite history. As always, this was paced by a blizzard of articles and commentaries in the media, a reminder that Beijing’s lies must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies. A typical example is this piece by Zheng Wang (汪錚) of Seton Hall in the Diplomat. “In Taiwan, 2025 also marks 80 years since the island’s return to China at the end of the war — a historical milestone largely omitted in official commemorations.” The reason for its
RSS