Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
The exhibition brings together approximately 200 modern Taiwanese artworks, 500 related documents and 100 Japanese works to reconsider the relationship between modern Taiwan and Japan.
It covers the period of Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945 and the later era of political repression under the Kuomintang known as the White Terror, and is organized into six chapters. Its maze-like installation offers no prescribed route, implicitly asking visitors to decide how they will move among the artworks and documents. The exhibition turns to small traces of lives left out of history, personal diaries and fragments of manuscripts, aiming to unsettle a single framework centered on Western modern art and move away from linear definitions imposed by states and nationalism.
Video footage presents wartime scenes primarily from the period after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, including reports on the Japanese military’s invasions of Wuhan and Guangzhou, soldiers at the front, the Greater East Asia Conference of Writers and imperial headquarters announcements; it also reports the abolition of the Chinese-language columns in Taiwan’s major newspapers as part of the imperial-subjectification policy. In the photograph '列車内での戦時演習の啓発', taken by Deng in the 1940s, a bespectacled man wearing something resembling a uniform reads from a booklet while passengers respond differently, some looking at him and others looking away with apparent indifference.
The '読売落下傘塔' at the Yomiuri amusement park in Futako-Tamagawa, once a ride where visitors enjoyed parachute descents, became a secret facility where the Army conducted descent training while posing as students as the wartime system intensified. A work painted in 1951 conveys a strong prayer for peace and tranquility; from today’s perspective, its sinking sun also seems linked to the long, dark period Taiwan would subsequently experience.
Many works and documents on display sharply question Japan’s colonial rule, while addressing the relationships and activities of Taiwanese and Japanese people under the major history of violence experienced by modern and contemporary Taiwan.
