In recent years, the network construction of Asian contemporary art, the exchange visits between relevant institutions and artists, as well as associated exhibitions have become prominent subjects. However, nationalist boundaries would easily dismiss the possibilities created by Asian contemporary artistic exchange once we are slightly incautious of dealing with these subjects. It was not until the 19th century did nationalism pervade the Asian ideology. Through nationalism, each of the areas with vast territory and ethnic variety (e.g. India, China, and Indonesia) was arbitrarily integrated into an imaginary entity. Nevertheless, the establishment of nation-states did not eliminate the internal complexity of these areas. When we use the term of “international” exchange, we in fact construct the exchange on the basis of the above-mentioned imaginary structure. When we contemplate the artistic exchange among different regions of Asia from a “state”-to-“state” perspective, we simultaneously eliminate the internal complexity and plurality of a state. We even ignore the fact that Asian ethnic groups, along with their subjective cultures and social structures, have already crossed the boundaries of states and achieved mutual pervasion. For contemporary Asia, the boundaries between states seem to be worthless and vapid. We can also argue that those boundaries never existed. They appear only when the artistic exchange proceeds in an institutional and academic way.
Taiwan as an independent political/social entity performs a kind of anti-boundary experiment: its “statehood” is not internationally recognized, the Taiwanese national identity is still in the process of formation, and the complexity of its multi-ethnic society is growing. These descriptions indicate that Taiwan is a “state” of “non-state,” “quasi-state” or even “anti-state.” Taiwan can therefore freely change its status according to the contextual requirements. Within some contexts, Taiwan interacts with other entities as a “region” or a community. Within other contexts, it becomes a bewildering “state” and interacts with “other states.” Different from most Asian “states,” the symbol of “Taiwan” as an entity is highly questionable for Taiwanese artists, because it is still a developing concept in the mind of every member on the island, even though Taiwan already has all the constituent elements of a state (except not being recognized by a great majority of states).
According to the current political and economic atmosphere, we can easily observe various cultural strategic attempts behind the contemporary artistic exchange among Asian states, particularly those among governmental organizations or large-scale institutions. These attempts always wear the camouflage of splendid exhibitions or grants. Under this condition, Taiwan tends to be excluded from the transnational network of Asian contemporary art because it is short of strategic values and even not being recognized as a “state.” Besides, the poor receptivity of Taiwanese society to external events makes Taiwanese artists unable to immediately learn of the events unfolded in the transnational network of Asian contemporary art, and therefore fail to enter this network and co-construct the rising “cultural community.” Such isolation, together with the ongoing domestic dispute over the construction of Taiwanese subjectivity, always makes the exploration of “the Asia in Taiwan” the starting point of Taiwanese artists when they deal with the critical issue of “Asia.”
The Taiwanese artist Lee Jo-Mei’s solo exhibition “Ishigaki Jima” (2009) reveals a forgotten piece of Taiwanese history. For Lee, the island that belongs to Okinawa is not simply exotic, and the theme of this work is not cross-cultural exchange. Instead, the work is simply the representation of her family history, and it depicts the settlement process of Taiwanese on the Ryukyu Islands. Lee followed the guidance of her grandfather’s memory and found a group of elderly people who speak Taiwanese in Okinawa. Yoshitaka Matsuda’s book Taiwanese in Yaeyama Islands is a mine of information on how Taiwanese immigrants settled in Okinawa and became “Japanese” after the Pacific War. After Taiwan entered the post-Martial Law era, the Japanese colonial legacy, namely the Japanized Taiwan, has been gradually re-excavated. This re-excavation presents various disturbing facts to the “Chinese world,” and these facts haunt every aspect of Taiwanese culture. Through the work “Torii” created by the Japanese artist Motoyuki Shitamichi, we seem to identify various images of “Japan” hidden in the alleys or mountain and fields in Taiwan tranquilly watching the passing of time.
The search for the Japan in Taiwan is to that for the tori ruins in the countryside what the search for the Taiwan in Japan is to that for the elderly on the Yaeyama Islands. They share the same goal of searching for a group of “survivors.” Different from this goal, dealing with the Southeast Asia in Taiwan and the Southeast Asian’s impression of Taiwan directly reveals the immigrants’ influence on Taiwan. Southeast Asian immigrants have dramatically changed Taiwanese social structure and cultural landscape. These immigrants include not only migrant workers who temporarily reside in Taiwan, but also many Vietnamese and Indonesian “brides” who have already obtained Taiwanese citizenship. According to the statistics of Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior, in 2006, the mothers of 3%-5% neonates are Vietnamese immigrants, and about ten thousands Vietnamese brides have been neutralized as Taiwanese that year. The first Vietnamese-narrated campaign advertisement appeared during Taiwan’s presidential election in 2012. It was unimaginable for the Vietnamese in Vietnam, who had never experienced universal and direct (democratic) elections. According to the latest estimation, one in every four or five newly graduated young people about to enter the job market has a Vietnamese, Indonesian, or Cambodian mother by the 2020s.
To deal with such a dramatic change, Taiwanese artists have started to document the “Southeast Asia” in Taiwan long before they conduct substantial exchange with the Southeast Asian art circle. Since her solo exhibition in 2005, the Taiwanese artist Lulu Shur-tzy Hou has initiated a project of series works entitled “Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan.” The project took a long period of time to document the life of Vietnamese brides in Taiwan. Hou even visited the hometowns of those Vietnamese brides in order to make a comparison between their living conditions in Taiwan and Vietnam. This kind of creators is commonly recognized by Taiwanese art circle probably because there is an urgent demand for understanding the Southeast Asia in Taiwan. For example, the work “REM Sleep” created by Yao Chia-En was conferred the 2011 Taishin Arts Awards. Yao asked several Southeast Asian migrant workers to describe the dreams they have ever made, and then revealed a more complete and real world with the workers’ mental structures. Su Yu-Hsien was invited to present his work that depicts the life of Indonesian boatmen in Taiwan at the “Taiwan Pavilion” of the 2011 Venice Biennale.
The frequency of contemporary artistic exchange between Taiwan and Southeast Asia has been increased considerably in the past two years. In addition to the Kuandu Biennale that has been held for years by the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts affiliated to the Taipei National University of the Arts, non-governmental artistic units such as the “Open Contemporary Art Center” and the “Outsiders Factory” also achieved great results in contemporary artistic exchange with Thailand and Vietnam respectively. In addition to Taiwan’s relationship with Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea, we cannot ignore the tangled and complicated relationship between Taiwan and China. Even in their artistic exchange, Taiwan has to change its status from a “state” to a “region,” while China becomes the “Mainland.” It might be quite difficult for other states to imagine such a situation that a “state” is forced to degrade its sovereignty. Nevertheless, such political reality enables Taiwan to flexibly switch its status between “state” and “non-state,” and develop different strategies and ways of observation according to its external circumstances. In 2012, “It Takes Four Sorts– Cross-Strait-Four-Region Artistic Exchange Project” created various possibilities that enable different “regions” to observe the differences between them. The process of respective description and mutual observation questioned the reality of “China” as a substantial cultural subject. Through this project, we also realized that, even within the compulsorily established boundaries, the artistic power and the complex dialectical structures produced through the “domestic exchange” shaped by the differences and dialogues among the subjectivities of different regions within the boundaries have gone beyond the homogenized cultural concept of “state.”
In fact, not only Taiwanese artists and artistic groups, but also many foreign artistic actors delight in addressing the above-mentioned heterogenization within the boundaries of states as well as the mutual pervasion of cultures and people triggered by historical factors and the development of politics and economics. For example, the South Korean artistic group “Mixrice” has paid attention to the migrant workers and new immigrants in South Korea for over a decade; and the Korean Japanese artist Kim In-Sook focused on the life stories of Korean Japanese through photography. These examples suggest that we must first of all discard the concept of “state-to-state exchange” during the exchange among Asian states. We must treat the blending and pervasion of Asian cultures in a more flexible and more organic way. Meanwhile, we must be aware of the tremendous and plural complex structures within the boundaries of states. It does not imply the break-off of trans-boundary exchange when “international exchange” is transformed into “internal-national exchange.” Only the exchange based on the imaginary subject of “state” will be replaced by that among the internal communities, groups, ethnic groups, individuals, and regions of the “state.” The power of such kind of exchange spread much more widely, and makes artistic creation and action closer to social reality. This is exactly the practical foundation of what I term “the Asia in Asian States.” Only through a more in-depth exploration and excavation of “the Asia in Asian States” can we provide the future Asian exchange with a wider diversity of complex texts and ways of observation, maintain a well-matched state of affairs between the “international exchange” of contemporary art and the reality of contemporary cultures, and thereby exert greater influence on every community in the big Asian family.
