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1. Relations among the islands of Malay Archipelago in a broad sense: the northern island, Formosa, as a departure point
The Malay Archipelago, in the traditional sense, refers to the group of scattered islands between mainland Indochina, New Guinea, and Australia. As the inevitable passage for ships sailing from the west towards East Asia, the archipelago whose islands are not distant from one another doesn’t see the ocean as a barrier. Instead, water functions as channels for contact and connection among themselves as well as with the external world, which allows the area to gain importance as a crossroads in the history of cultural exchanges and to play a role in the multilateral dynamics with its neighboring civilizations. Today, most islands belong to the Republic of Indonesia. Although territorial boundaries of modern nations largely mismatch divisions of ethnic groups and cultures, Taiwan has sustained close ties with Indonesia throughout history due to geographical proximity, ethnic and cultural similarities, and a shared past as colonies facing the oppression of imperial powers. It’s a pity that this rich history of exchanges is rarely known to contemporary Taiwanese society due to geopolitical and international factors.
Taiwan, the island the Creator placed in the middle of the first island chain in the western Pacific, had been a stronghold for pirates and fishermen of different ethnic groups to take shelter or to obtain supplies long before it was recorded in Chinese written history or before its beauty was described in Westerners’ travelogues for the first time. It served, too, as a trading post for businessmen coming from islands in the north or continents in the west. Moreover, Taiwan was one of the locations where Austronesian people started their southward migration during Austronesian expansion. These facts, however, had faced severe disruptions in the chronological axis of history writing due to Taiwan’s multilayered complexity which involves colonization, survivors of political upheavals and imperial dynasties, as well as numerous regime changes. Geographical rupture is characteristic of Taiwanese history as well: under the rule of China or Japan, long-standing exchanges and interactions between Taiwan and the South are often excluded from the historical narrative of either political power due to divisions of ethnic categories and national borders.
2. Letter．Callus．Post-War: craftsmanship, personal memories, and historical eras
Through time, traditional history writing has evolved into a state sector, national history, in modern nation states. The making of what is called “official history” is largely consequent to contestations of powers and ideologies. In addition to different stances in history writings due to political power struggles, the contention in a broader sense is also crucial – the question of “who has the power to write history” and “whose history deserves to be recorded.” Even though human beings have inhabited Taiwan for several thousand years, a majority of incidents may have been left out from the “history” of the island that has never gained its autonomy. Most private letters disappear over time as traditional “history” writing is not able to be exhaustive. Only very rarely are some letters included in “history.” Among those which cannot be recorded in written form and traces of interactions between humans and objects lies a substantial amount of physical residue, both in “history” and in the overlooked “non-history,” after the course of time washes off most existence.
In the exhibition, Letter．Callus．Post-War, artists conduct fieldwork and research to collect, deconstruct, and reassemble information of existing objects and legends in order to explore their own personal memories at two different levels. In terms of spatiality, relations between Taiwan and Nanyang (South Sea) throughout history are contemplated over. In terms of materiality, remaining private documents and letters, as well as traces of interactions between humans and objects, are investigated in order to discuss the relationships between personal memories and the grand historical narrative under power struggles in history. Based on a geographical structure encompassing Taiwan and the Malay Archipelago and a chronological framework of 400 years starting with the 17th century, the article attempts to discover individuals who have existed for real yet are neglected in the grand whirl of vicissitudes of their times. Through “historical materials” people left behind and “history re-writings” with artists’ narratives and works, a quest for stories of Taiwan and Indonesia forgotten by many and by historical eras is initiated.
3. From prehistory, traditional craftsmanship to allegories.
“History,” in a broad sense, can be said to have originated at the time when humans tried to describe their experiences in the form of symbols. In recent years, archeologists discovered wall paintings dated between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago in a group of caves in the Maros–Pangkep Karst region of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. A human hand stencil and a figurative depiction of a pig-deer are found in the caves, which inspires Wu Chi-Yu to conduct on-site visits and investigations. Following Wu’s research, a series of works, “The First Immersive Experience”,”The Visual Components of the First Immersive Experience”,”Eyes of Convergent Evolution”,”Hominins”, is created to explore the long-standing relations between art and humans in the planet’s extensive history, drawing upon humanity’s earliest cave paintings on Sulawesi island and key concepts like archeology, evolution, and geology.
One of the main focuses in Wu Chi-Yu’s artistic practice is the investigation of ways of seeing. In this exhibition, Wu addresses similarities and differences between ancient and contemporary ways of seeing by extending the historical axis of the discussion. One can see in”Hominins” that the artist juxtapositions prehistoric murals and contemporary VR technology to inspect the dynamics among image, the act of seeing, and human reasoning. Without written descriptions and textual contexts, murals are usually not counted as part of “history.” However, hand-crafted images which have lasted for tens of thousands of years may contain more information and provide evidence to our imagination of the time. Besides, in Wu’s work, the narrator often breaks the fourth wall and questions the audience directly. This allows viewers to switch between two positions – one immersed in the video and one as a distant observer in front of the screen.(註1) The high resemblance between this approach and that of historian is apparent: when a historian tries to make depictions of a period of time or an incident, he/she has to be completely immersed in a historical scene while coming back and carrying out questionings from a contemporary point of view at the same time.
Batik that dates back to thousand years ago is a handcraft technique of wax-resist dyeing symbolic of ethnic groups of the Malay Archipelago. The complexity of diverse religions and ethnicities on the archipelago has enriched the culture of Batik greatly. Nowadays, many Indonesians still practice this ancient tradition. People adorn themselves with Batik costumes at important events to show their respect for the occasion, as well as to demonstrate their social status. Indonesian artist Arwin Hidayat uses Batik as a main medium in his artistic practice. He presents life in his village and his imaginative worlds using this ancient craftsmanship passed down through generations in the works. For instance, “The Village I Live In” that is full of unique symbols created by the artist introduces images of the colonizers, religious pictures, contemporary everyday objects, and future technology altogether on one piece of Batik fabric, as if the time-honored past of the East Indies was transformed and compressed onto the same dimension through traditional craftsmanship.
In addition to carrying on the handcraft tradition and creating graphic representation, preserving legends and histories through oral tradition and allegory is as well a widespread practice shared in various human cultures across the globe before writing appears or becomes commonly available. During Zhang-Xu Zhan’s artist-in-residence program in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, he learned about mouse-deer, an animal considered clever in local legends on the Malay Archipelago, and the tale “The Mouse-Deer and the Crocodile” in which a mouse-deer turns a hazardous situation around in the jungle with his wit. Zhang-Xu’s work, “Tale of Animal AT58”, pieces together “The Mouse-Deer and the Crocodile” and the Chinese folktale about the clever fox— two stories in different contexts yet similar in the plots—and uses papercraft to reconstruct and reinterpret the two fables. Except for the existing characters and storylines, the artwork’s sound and set design both demonstrate imageries deriving from dialogues between the two cultures, as if a new legend, a new fable, was forged through this storytelling. It may be passed on; it may change in the future, and it may come into being again. This shows that oral histories can be fairly grand as well as tightly compressed, or it can also be reproduced across cultures.
4. Empire’s colonial rule over the archipelago in the early modern period
One cannot address the forming of modern national borders of Indonesia without mentioning VOC, the Dutch East India Company that used to be a global power once dominating the ocean for over two centuries and playing a crucial role in global exchanges of business, cultures, and species(註2). The time under Dutch East India Company’s rule is one of the few memories Taiwan and Indonesia share in the early modern period. As the company’s stay in Taiwan is short, it leaves fairly limited amount of heritages. Several works of the artists use the company’s activities in Asia as starting points and tell stories of the 17th century neglected by official written history through the use of remaining historical records and objects from the time.
Liu Yu’ s “Caecus Creaturae” is a semi-documentary video which centers around the life of Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627-1702), a botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company, and looks for traces of his stay on the East Indies(註3). Rumphius’ important contribution to science is widely recognized(註4): a large part of his findings and writings on natural history is included in Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Old and New East-India), a huge compilation published in 1726 by his friend, François Valentijn(註5). For Liu Yu,”Caecus Creaturae” is not merely about the life of Rumphius that is full of hardships and suffering, nor his neglected contributions. What’s more important in her artistic trajectory is the discussions of perceptions humans experience in relation to the physical world, particularly how physically-challenged people propose their insights and make contributions to the world. Therefore, an intriguing dynamic can be observed between “Caecus Creaturae” and Wu Chi-Yu’s works in this exhibition, “Eyes of Convergent Evolution” and “Hominins”.
During the age of discovery and years to come, an unprecedented traffic across borders of kingdoms appeared in human history for the first time. People traveled between kingdoms; barriers among different races were shaken; and people of multinational and multiracial backgrounds increased. Japanese artist mamoru’s work, “Firando Tayouan” Batavia – Japan Taiwan Indonesia”, connects three Dutch East India Company’s East Asian strongholds at the time: Firando, Japan; Tayouan, Taiwan; Batavia, Indonesia. With a story happening in these three port cities, the artwork addresses cultural, ethnic and religious hybridization on the vast ocean across Europe and Asia in that era.
Starting with Japan, mamoru’s work tells the story of a mixed-race girl who had a European father and a Japanese mother. Japan at the time had just entered the Tokugawa Bakufu era after over a hundred years of the Sengoku period (a period of military unrest and political upheavals in Japanese history during 1467-1615). Due to concerns about influences of Western religions on domestic politics, the Japanese Bakufu government banned foreign ships from sailing in and out of Japan at will. Christians were expelled. Mixed-race individuals born to European and Japanese parents were removed from foreigner’s residences in Firando and deported to Batavia. This route from Firande through Taiwan to Batavia, initially, was a key trading route for Dutch traders to sail to Japan, through which tea, silk, and paper goods were traded. The artist delicately stitches these elements together in the work. The moving story of the mixed-race girl reminds one of “An-pîng Tui-sióng-khhi (Song of An-ping reminisce)”, a song commonly known to Taiwanese society telling the love story between a Dutch naval surgeon and a Taiwanese girl who later gave birth to their daughter. Even though it was composed in the early post-war period, the keywords, Netherlands and An-ping, brought the audience back to 17th-century Tayouan Port under the Dutch rule. According to the findings of local historians and researchers, the story in “An-pîng Tui-sióng-khik (Song of An-ping reminisce)” possibly took place during the late Qing dynasty in the 19th century after An-ping Port was opened to Western merchants and sailors who came to Taiwan for business. The 17th-century Dutch colonization marked the first period of large-scale global exchanges that evolved Taiwan in history, whereas the opening of An-ping Port in the 19th century marked the second. These two periods of massive international exchanges had left many stories unrecorded in official history, yet they were passed on through oral tradition, folklore, and artworks.
Lo Yi-Chun’s two works happened to correspond respectively to the two periods of time in Taiwanese history with massive international exchanges, the 17th and 19th centuries. The artist chose deerskin, the main Taiwanese export under the rule of Dutch East India Company in the 17th century, as an inspiration for the work, Deer Rug. At the time, a rather large proportion of deerskins was exported to Japan due to the demand of “Haori,” a type of traditional Japanese Samurai wear made of deerskin(註6). Although the turmoil of the Sengoku period had ended at the start of the 17th century, Haori gained its cultural significance as one of the important elements of formal Samurai wear, the design of which became an ostentatious display of social status pursued by the warrior caste. Dutch East India Company’s trading network in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia thus came in handy. Deerskins were bought from Taiwanese aboriginals in bulk and then sold to Japan to produce Haoris. Dutch colonists raked in the money; Japanese Samurais obtained what they needed. However, the price Taiwan paid was huge: the mass hunting had erased Formosan sika deer from southern Taiwanese plains once populated with deer. This could be seen as a typical example of produces exploited by colonizers at their colonies.
Another work of Lo’s is based upon Formosan Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyura) now considered extinct by biologists. Taiwanese aborigines living in the mountains have had since ancient times many encounters with the leopards. For aborigines, clothes and accessories made of skin and bones of hunted leopards passed on by their ancestors symbolize prestigious status and bravery. The first record of Formosan Clouded Leopard in modern biology can attribute to Robert Swinhoe, an English biologist and a consular representative to the island of Formosa after An-ping Port was opened in the 19th century. Under the Japanese rule, Formosan Clouded Leopards were caught numerous times, the taxidermy of which can now be seen in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum. However, due to the already small population, and gradual disruption and destruction of their habitats, traces of the leopards can hardly be seen after world war II.
Lo’s choice of the animal species representative in Taiwanese history enriches the work with vivid imagery. Her delicate artistic approach is also demonstrated in her decision and exquisite treatment of materials which bear complex implications in relation to Taiwan’s past as a colony. Banana has long been sold to Japan as an important export that takes up significant market share. To make the work, Lo has dedicated extensive manual labor sewing a large number of banana skins into a sculpture that resembles a piece of deerskin, a produce of historical significance, implicating the entangling economic relations between Taiwan and Japan over hundreds of years. In “Formosan Clouded Leopard (Mysterious Voices)”, on the other hand, Lo uses Indonesia’s important produce during the colonial time, tobacco leaves of kretek cigarettes, to create a piece of animal skin with patterns of Formosan Clouded Leopard. The work not only addresses the distribution of clouded leopards in Southeast Asia, but also speaks to Taiwan’s past as a colony by choosing the agricultural produce loaded with colonial connotations. The two works, made with extensive manual labor, discuss the history of labor-intensive industry of hunting deer, processing deerskins, and agricultural production, cleverly commenting right on the association of “callus,” part of the exhibition title, with heavy labor. Whereas Deer Rug refers to Dutch and Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, “Formosan Clouded Leopard (Mysterious Voices)” juxtapositions Dutch East Indies with Taiwan. The colonial rule over the archipelago is rendered particularly daunting on tropical lands heavily exploited.
5. War and post-war: the violence of modern nations against disadvantaged individuals
In the 20th century, modernism comes to a certain degree of maturity; colonial imperialism, capitalism, communism, and fascism all have their loud voices, dragging the whole world into a whirl of ideological disputes. Before the war, modern nations venture into new lands and colonize them with their highly developed modernity and instruments. The destruction and torment of humanity see its worst day during the Second World War. Meicy Sitorus investigates the damage wars can do to humanity. For example, to carry out “Nona Djawa”, a photography project which discusses Japanese army’s comfort stations in Indonesia, the artist visits comfort stations across Java, interviews frail vulnerable old women who served as comfort women during the Second World War, and takes photos to document their looks. Sitorus argues that photography has always been the tool which imperial power use to document, measure, categorize, and oversee the colonies since the day it was invented(註7). Images produced by national powers illustrate how photography as a perfect instrument has well served colonialism — a symbol of the hegemonic power the colonists have over their subjects. Reading through the research behind the artwork, one would suddenly realize that the historical records proving the persecution enforced on comfort women on Java Island match the official correspondence in which “Taiwan Army of Japan(註8)” demanded more comfort women be sent to Borneo, which serves as evidence of the cruelty of empires, wars, and invasion.
Chen Qian-Wu (1922-2012), a Taiwanese writer who joined the Japanese Volunteer Army upon its first recruitment, was sent to Nanyang by the Japanese Empire during the Pacific War(註9). He published a novel based on the experiences after his return. Drawing upon Chen’s Nanyang stories written in the novel, Meicy Sitorus created “Encounters, Figura”. Sitorus’ personal experience in Taiwan as a contemporary Indonesian posed a dialogue with what Chen Qian-Wu wrote about his first visit to Dutch East Indies as a soldier of the Japanese Volunteer Army more than 70 years ago. The artist visited former comfort stations in Taiwan and used photography to document these historical sites that are mostly appropriated for other uses today. Like what Wu Chieh-Hsiang said, “For Meicy Sitorus, photography is not about gathering evidence, but witnessing the elimination of traces of wars and feminine memories loaded with traumas.(註10)”
As a Taiwanese, Chen Qian-Wu’s low status in the army could be due to the fact that he was from the colony. He was forced to do his superior some sexual favors. The domination he suffered from was always there, day and night. However, in relation to Indonesian comfort women (under Sitorus’ lens), Taiwanese people could also become oppressors who enforced exploitation. Such absurd duality makes it inevitable to look at Taiwan’s liminal status sandwiched between different entities during the war when one attempts to understand Taiwan’s situation and positioning in Asia in history. It is also what Wu Chuo-Liu describes as “Orphan of Asia” in his book title. Initially, this wasn’t “our” war, but “we” participated in the war, willingly or otherwise, standing for “ourselves,” but we also didn’t seem to stand for “ourselves.” The enemy in the war was possibly “them,” but “they” were sometimes more similar to “me” than “we” were. As a result, Taiwanese were passionate yet confused in this war. Although the Second World War has ended over 70 years ago, things haven’t yet led to a conclusion of such a liminal state. After the war, Taiwan is immediately dragged into the chaos of Chinese Civil War, followed by the Cold-War period for over half a century, which further complicates the situation and makes it even more improbable to find closure. Some sentiments and wounds during the war are documented; some others are neglected, sealed, and still hauntingly and traumatically present till today.
National violence did not only occur in colonial empires before the war. Countries who claimed themselves belonging to the “liberal” alliance after the Second World War also committed human rights violations on the grounds of social stability and anti-communism(註11). The most infamous in Indonesia was “the Thirtieth of September Movement” in 1965 (註12). Till today, this traumatic incident that broke many families has still not comprehensively discussed. “Tale of Wanatentrem Chronicle” by Maharani Mancanagara was based on the diary of her grandfather who was a political prisoner and victim of the Thirtieth of September Movement. With Koblen prison in Surabaya where her grandfather was imprisoned as a starting point of the artwork, Mancanagara explores details and relevant occurrences of the incident. Through artistic treatments, history is transformed into a graphic novel like a seeming fairytale for people today to understand its multifaceted complexity and to reflect on the bloodstained past.
6. Mobility and diaspora across national borders
In human history, the 20th century is the century with the most upheavals induced by wars. Consequently, traffic and exchanges across national borders happen on an enormous scale. On the other hand, the rapid development of mass communication media allows it to become an instrument for national propaganda and control that has played a role during the Cold War in the last half of the 20th century. “If We Do Not Exist, How Could Our Memories Remain and Not Pass into Silence”, the work of Chen Yow-Ruu and Au Sow-Yee, constructs “a map of memories” with everyday objects and creates dialogues between the artist’s personal experiences, memories, and the grand narrative of history. What enters the sight first in the exhibition is the propaganda video made by the US, leader of the liberal alliance during the Cold War, illustrating the daily life in post-war Singapore under American influence. Young Asian boys and girls in khaki uniform who admire symbols of liberalism, such as White House and the Statue of Liberty, as well as a dock filled with sampans, do not look too different from that in Cold-War Taiwan at first glance. For many East Asians and Southeast Asians growing up in anti-communist countries friendly with the US, it is a shared sensory, empirical “history.” In addition, images and footage of American soldiers in the artwork are all too familiar for people growing up in Post-War Taiwan since they were often seen in news coverage of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, as well as movies produced across East Asia. There can be considerable overlap between personal memories and the times one lives in. Through watching and reading the work, viewers are inspired to reflect on the intricate relations between the two. Or maybe the two can be evidential to each other’s existence.
In addition, “If We Do Not Exist, How Could Our Memories Remain and Not Pass into Silence” includes “Ghosts in the Forest,” an interview published in the 1970s in The Rambler. Like the Nanyang version of Cape No. 7, the story starts with letters sent by a Dutch woman, Rika Hoskens, from the Netherlands to Kabuasua, Tainan in 1969. The letters were addressed to a local Taiwanese, Nakamura (Luo Zhen-Xiang). In 1942, Nakamura was sent by the Japanese Government to Nanyang to work for an oil company. During his stay in Surabaya, Java, Nakamura fell in love with the Dutch girl who lived in East Indies at the time. 27 years after they parted, Rika attempted to write letters to Nakamura. Despite the fact that the address after the war was completely different from that under Japanese rule, the letters eventually reached Luo Zhen-Xiang with the help and hard work of mail carriers. Besides the telling of Taiwanese being sent to Nanyan during the Pacific War, the story is also about Luo Zhen-Xiang’s hometown, Kabuasua, a community that relatively well preserved traditional Siraya culture which a tribe of Taiwanese plains indigenous peoples in Tainan. The love story of Luo and Hoskens reminds one of the times when the Dutch first came to Taiwan and that their first encounter with indigenous people was exactly the Siraya people. Twists and turns of history seem to bring people to the same corner again.
Similarly, Lin Yi-Chi’s “Nanyang Express: Trans-drifting and South Sea Crossing”, based on the correspondence with her relatives who migrated to Southeast Asia, explores people’s mobility across national borders in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Lin’s grandmother is from Kinmen. Her granduncle has migrated to Bangka Island, Indonesia, from Kinmen in 1946. Two siblings apart have long remained in contact via letters. For Lin, Bangka Island where she has only visited once in her childhood is a familiar yet estranged place. In 2018, she flies to Bangka Island to visit her relatives and recorded the journey. In the work, the differences in languages and nationalities between them are apparent, yet consanguinity still sustains the important connection of the family. Emigrations from coastal China to Nanyang, especially from the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, starts hundreds of years ago. Over the centuries, overseas Chinese have been rather influential politically, economically and socially in Southeast Asian countries. It is also common for Chinese businessmen to build connections through marriage across countries(註13). However, anti-Chinese sentiment and related incidents in Southeast Asian countries have resulted in immigrants giving up their Chinese names and languages to avoid persecution, like what Lin’s relatives did. As the minority that is foreign to the country, how overseas Chinese keep their traditions while at the same time integrate into the local society can be an indispensable issue. On the contrary, Taiwan with a similar history of Chinese migration demonstrates a drastically different cultural landscape and development path due to the differences in the numbers of migrants and geographical proximity to China. Lin’s work illustrates complex cross-national myriads shaped by national histories before and after the war via the means of personal narratives of consanguinity and communication, which serves as representative depictions of the Chinese diaspora.
Lu Yi-Lun who traveled with Lin Yi-Chi observed the daily life and Chinese immigrants in Indonesian society. People and landscapes captured by Lu Yi-Lun through photography are presented in the exhibitions as photos whose chronological order and context are removed. This allows the audience to contemplate over, to perceive what lies ahead of immigrant’s daily life. Such observing viewpoints coincidentally parallels writer Chen Qian-Wu’s depictions of Indonesian landscapes during his first visit. Sensitivities and observations which are not recorded in the grand history are thus preserved in the form of art.