You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you. This is the main lesson that viewers can take from Teng Chao-ming’s (鄧兆旻) solo exhibition, Therefore, X=X (因此,X等於X) at Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), a breezy, open-air gallery in Taipei’s Da-an District (大安).
Teng, who was born in Taipei in 1977, transforms four pivotal moments of Taiwanese pop history into works of art. The songs, films and books which inspired him span the period of the Japanese colonial era to the height of martial law in the 1960s and 1970s. Three of the four original creators were born in China but grew up in Taiwan after 1949.
Employing more text than visual imagery, Teng’s artwork especially speaks to the younger generation of educated Taiwanese who came of age in a vastly different socio-political atmosphere detached from nostalgia for China. Teng’s artistic renditions of past works therefore reminds young viewers that history shapes present day politics and identities — a timely message in the wake of the student-led Sunflower movement.
Photo: Dana Ter
SINGING IN THE RAIN
To Sing or Not to Sing? (2014) explores the historical impact of the 1934 Hokkien pop song A Flower in the Rainy Night (雨夜花). Teng lists each time the song was used in a public event in Taiwan over the last 80 years from operas to political demonstrations by printing these dates on a wooden wall. The dates are also printed alongside names of historical and contemporary politicians.
The unevenly spaced characters create a feeling of disconnect, mirroring the viewer’s own frustration with making sense of the artwork. The words however, are not random at all. Teng references Nancy Guy, a music professor at the University of California at San Diego. Guy argues in her 2008 article in The Drama Review, that the ill-fated young woman in the song has no control over her destiny, just as how Taiwan’s fate (seemingly) depends on policy decisions in Beijing and Washington.
The different sections of the wall become less wordy until only commas, periods and parentheses are left. While these empty spaces may allude to silence and censorship, it also suggests that the future has yet to be written.
MURDER HE WROTE
Teng’s other pieces are influenced by works created by Chinese-born Taiwanese artists and writers. A Monument for the (Im)possibility of Figuring it Out (2012) was inspired by director Edward Yang’s (楊德昌) A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件), a 1991 film about conflicts between teenage gang members from Taiwanese families and exiled Chinese families. The film is a dramatization of a real murder which occurred in 1961 when the son of a civil servant killed his girlfriend who was involved with another gang leader.
Teng reconstructs scenes from the film by arranging them as clues on stainless steel palettes. It is the viewer’s job to piece together the scattered “clues” in order to solve the mystery. Teng also monumentalizes the murder in his fiberglass sculpture depicting the fatal stabbing.
The non-chronological arrangement of the clues creates confusion and forces viewers to reflect upon the significance of the murder. Although it occurred in 1961, the two-sided political rivalry which spawned it is still very much alive today.
IDENTITY THEFT
In Taipei People Drawing (2009), Teng transcribed the entire text of Pai Hsien-Yung’s (白先勇) Taipei People (台北人), a collection of short stories compiled in 1971 of people who fled to Taiwan from China in 1949. Teng’s fixation with this sense of “lost Chinese-ness,” as he writes in his gallery notes, is evident in his painstaking handwritten transcription.
The theme of loss is also central in A Familiar Catastrophe (2014), which is Teng’s artistic reinterpretation of Wang Wen-Hsing’s (王文興) 1972 novel Family Catastrophe (家變). Teng recreates the father’s abandonment through a giant-sized blue poster which represents the background used for taking identity card or passport pictures. His 10,000 copies of “Missing Father” fliers further emphasize this feeling of loss and searching for identity. It also draws an eerie parallel to Taiwan’s search for its own identity.
The constant references to China in Therefore, X=X may seem antiquated or disturbing to some viewers. Others may disagree with Teng’s rigid approach of likening pop history to a mathematical proof. However, it is the process of solving the equation that matters most. Likewise, what the exhibition does well is prove the need to confront an entangled past.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would