It’s Friday and 10 cadets from the Fu Hsing Kang (復興崗) military academy are rushing from end to end of an art gallery in Taipei’s Ximending, preparing for their public debut.
“We really, really hope that people will come. That is why we do it out here and not only on campus,” Chang Hui-yi (張慧儀) says, as all around her the cadets — predominately young men — sweep debris and lovingly set articles of art on the wall.
Together, they have created a microfilm and clay stop-motion animation that depict the daily life of young officers.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Each cadet has also produced a large-scale oil painting and a large-scale ink painting, as the culmination of their four years in the fine arts division of the military academy.
Chang, a slim 23-year-old who comes from Greater Kaohsiung, is in charge of the Exhibition for Combat Art (硬漢).
Fu Hsing Kang’s Department of Applied Art holds an exhibition for seniors every year, but this one has taken on the distinct mission of peeling back the curtain between civilians and the armed forces.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“We are making a great effort to present ourselves to the public,” she says.
Compared to past work, this year’s paintings are less abstract, and more literal and realistic. They are also strikingly personal, featuring people as subjects — often themselves.
Gun ’n’ Rose, Chang’s oil painting, is a representation of herself with a rifle, surrounded by a wreath of roses.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Pan Cheng-hong (潘政宏), a tall dark-faced cadet, has also painted a self portrait. At the Dining Table (餐桌上) is an oil painting featuring four young men, all him, eating in the mess hall.
“They are me at a different ages,” Pan says.
Pan as a college junior is chewing his food distractedly, and Pan as a senior is gazing dreamily at younger versions of himself.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“As you see, I get more relaxed as I age. There I am in freshman year, sitting up straight. Here I am as a sophomore, glaring at myself as a freshman. I’m helping my old self improve on his bad habits and to become an officer,” he says.
In a neighboring painting by Huang Teng-yao (黃騰嶢), a fire blazes in the background as soldiers engage in military exercises “in the city,” which are more frenetic and dramatic than wilderness exercises, Huang says.
Yeh Chia-wen’s (葉佳汶) work is a diptych.
In one painting, a male officer in camouflage is surrounded by men in plainclothes. In the other, a young woman officer in Yeh’s likeness is surrounded by civilian women.
Both officers are alone, standing slightly apart from the others with strange and conflicted expressions.
“The image of army officers is quite bad. We live on campus, but we know what the public thinks about us, especially after the case of Corporal Hung,” Yeh says, referring to the death of 24-year-old conscript Hung Chung-chiu (洪仲丘) last July due to abuse, which spurred a mass demonstration.
“So we wanted to share with the public something about ourselves,” she says.
THE NEW FACES OF RECRUITMENT
The division of fine arts at Fu Hsing Kang is tiny: This year, it is graduating just 10 students.
Each is trained much like other cadets are trained, as a career officer first. After leaving Fu Hsing Kang, they will go on to posts across Taiwan, where they will take on routine command duties but also visual media projects — including ones in the defense ministry’s recruitment campaign.
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Defense set the voluntary military recruitment target at 10,557 by year’s end, as part of a goal to achieve an all-volunteer force by 2017.
It is an optimistic, and some say unreachable, goal, in a time of a dwindling youth population and when scandals have hurt the reputation of the armed forces.
Steps taken to boost recruitment have included the easing of physical requirements, as well as improving compensation, benefits and other incentives. But another part of improving recruitment is improving the presentation of incentives, Chang says.
“Think of the traditional recruitment poster, in which there is a photograph of a man and a line of text, ‘Join the army and achieve this or that,’” Chang says.
“It’s not good in terms of the photo composition or the message. Even if the things you can achieve are good, people are unable to really appreciate that from this poster,” she says.
In recent years, the defense ministry has tested other concepts, notably a “Transformers” promo in 2009 that raised eyebrows.
The recruitment commercial showed fighter planes, battleships and tanks morphing into a team of Transformers.
“It sparked a reaction the ministry did not expect. People were confused or thought it was funny — we could see that on the Internet,” Chang says.
WOW, SO COOL
On the gallery’s third floor, the cadets have hung up a row of art prints, their best guesses at what visual media could appeal to prospective enlistees today.
In these prints, the slogans are modern and the motifs are everyday objects. “Just Do It,” reads one. In another, a traffic sign features the infinity symbol and a pint-sized soldier in green.
Images of the flag are kept to a minimum. The colors are loud and the text is minimalist and modern.
In one poster, a soldier is depicted front and center, Pop Art style, appearing resolute and bearing a hulking vintage machete. A cartoon speech bubble hovers over his head: “Wow. So Cool.”
It could be a movie poster for a Quentin Tarantino film, but not after you read the fine print. The word “Warriors” is stamped at the bottom of the print — in English and in hot pink. Beneath it is a line in Chinese: “If your heart is moved, then act immediately” (心動可以立刻行動).
Chang’s own piece is a digital illustration showing soldiers on a disaster relief mission. The poster has a funky layered look that seems at home in the creative industry’s bourgeoning animation, comics and games sector, but less so on the wall of a recruitment center.
“We are able to do work like this because we only have to answer to our teachers. Once you are in the defense ministry you do need to follow your many superiors’ instructions and sometimes that makes it hard for new work to come up,” Chang says.
“We hope to let our superiors see some different options. Show that these techniques can be used in the army, too. If they like it, they will call on us to make more,” she says.
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