Chang Cheng-kuang (張正光) was a teenager studying in Osaka in 1945 when he was drafted into the feared kamikaze, or suicide squad, of the Japanese imperial air force.
Though a foreigner in Japan, Chang’s Taiwanese nationality made him a colonial subject, which meant that he too had to contribute to the war effort. Sent to carry out a suicide mission against US warships near Okinawa, the Americans instead shot down Chang’s plane over the sea, rescuing him from certain death.
From Hong Kong, where he was next sent to keep the books for Japanese conglomerates, to Yilan, where he eventually settled down as a shrimp-farming baron, Chang, who died in 2013 at the age of 83, continued to live a storied life — literally.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
In 2015, the artist Kao Chun-hung (高俊宏) published Novel: The Taiwanese Japanese Soldier Chang Cheng-kuang and I (小說: 台籍日本兵張正光與我), which was based on interviews he had conducted with Chang just days before the veteran’s death.
Extracts from that book, in which Chang’s biography is interspersed with Kao’s own musings about his parents and his search for traces of Chang’s past, conjure the composite historical figure at the center of Estuary: Return to the Novel (出海口: 重返小說), a multimedia installation now showing as part of Island Tales: Taiwan and Australia at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
The exhibition marks 20 years since Taipei and Perth became sister cities. (A counterpart presentation, Unfolding Acts: New Art from Taipei and Perth, is now also showing at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.)
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Chang’s improbable life, Kao’s dreamlike storytelling and the interweaving of their two personas combine documentary and fiction, and create a whole that’s larger than the sum of its parts. Those acts of self-narration and novelization are central to Island Tales, which sees 13 Taiwanese and Australian artists reinterpret and retell their own histories and memories.
Vaulting over its bureaucratic origins, Island Tales does not merely commemorate, but asks uncomfortable and relevant questions about people’s connection to the land, the status of being a visitor or alien and the inability to know fully what has come and gone before us.
SMALL TRUTHS
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
The Chinese phrase for tale, xiaoshuo (小說), first appears in the writings of Zhuangzi (莊子) in the chapter “External Things” (外物), where it is used for its literal meaning of “small talk.” In modern-day parlance, xiaoshuo now means fiction or novel, and encompasses the trivial details of everyday life as well as the stuff of legends.
Like Marcel Proust’s madeleine, some of the most persistent memories we have are also the most prosaic. Such everyday observations form the basis of works like Short Fiction (短篇小說) by Liu Chih-hung (劉致宏), which consists of a series of greyscale, slice-of-life paintings — a sleeping cat, a kitchen stove, a urinal — any number of which can be linked together to tell a new story.
The link between Australia and Taiwan is most palpable with Australian artist Gregory Pryor, who served a residency at Taipei Artist Village in 2007. In List from 241002 — 140907, Pryor exhibits his diary entries, including some written during his time in Taiwan. Reading them is to go inside a mind that seems perpetually displaced and one measure removed from its surroundings.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Notes on the mundane — “Roast duck for dinner” — and the lofty — “My imagination is released” — are placed side-by-side with no hierarchy, like the faculty of memory itself. Each diary entry is accompanied by a drawing done in gold leaf on carbon paper, illustrating the way that our memories may be precious, but are also mere facsimiles of reality.
Pryor has also run his jottings through Google Translate to produce crude and sometimes nonsensical Chinese translations, further proof of the synthetic nature of our representations of reality.
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
Just as Chang’s life can be writ large as part of Taiwan’s history, other artworks also draw on the personal to comment on the nation. Musing on a visit to a noodle shop, Pryor writes with wry humor: “We are here to see if they are willing to teach me how to hand-pull noodles / The manager seems nervous and suspicious / The skill is a closely guarded commercial secret and he wonders if I am a noodle spy.”
The next day, he becomes aware of the motivations behind his outing: “I realize my interest in the mystery of hand-pulled noodles is an attempt to understand the long and tangled threads that exist between Taiwan and China.”
It’s one of several explicitly political moments in the exhibition, which does not shy away from examining geopolitical friction and conflicts between government and the governed.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Wang Ting-yeh (王鼎曄) uses sound, film and text to delve into his family history in Confronting Memories (勇為), which focuses on memories of his grandfather who disappeared and was killed under mysterious circumstances during the White Terror era.
Incorporating recollections from his relatives — gathered through a family Line chat group — as well as actual dust from the family home, Wang expresses his family’s grief for the patriarch they lost at such a young age, and their regret about never finding out what happened to him after his disappearance.
Visiting on a weekday afternoon, this act of remembering was made all the more poignant to me by the sight of elementary school children on a museum tour sitting on the floor and haltingly reading Wang’s English phoneticization of Hoklo (or Taiwanese) utterances from his grandfather: “I will die two times: the first time my soul will depart; the second time I will vanish from your memories.”
In Welcome to Balardong, members of the York Noongar community in Western Australia use claymation to recreate scenes from their childhoods. Their experiences are shaped by familial love but also official discrimination against Aboriginal people. One narrator recalls an incident in her girlhood when she resolved to defy segregationist laws by insisting on drinking her milkshake inside the shop like other customers.
Even when politically and socially-minded, Island Tales manages to produce visually engaging and conceptually innovative works. Pilar Mara Dupont’s Purgatorio imagines the process of seeking asylum in Australia as a literally interminable bureaucratic song-and-dance. In Dan McCabe’s Joiner Series, landscapes from specific locations are reduced to unrecognizable acrylic sheets, which recall pixelated digital images as well as color field paintings.
Perhaps the most immersive work is The Compendium of Autobiographies (自傳大系) by Chang Wen-hsuan (張紋瑄), which considers how stories change depending on who is telling them. In an office tasked with editing an autobiography so as to “keep people with different values from judging the publisher,” three groups of editors come up with differently censored versions of the text based on their particular beliefs and stations in life.
The exercise is a microcosm of how the story of a nation is collectively and contentiously written by all its people. Island Tales is rich in such ideas, although visitors will need to invest the time to give each artwork its due attention.
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