Southeast Asian New Immigrant-Themed Contemporary Art as an Approach to Anti-Authoritarian Practices at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taiwan

Abstract

This article examines the exhibition Family Memo-Island of Memory and Migration: Southeast Asia New Immigrant-Themed Contemporary Art (11 May–26 August 2018) at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan. As part of the institution’s transnational justice exhibition, Family Memo was the first and only exhibition to feature South East Asian culture and issues of immigration—especially migrant workers and marriage migrants. This topic created a veiled dialogue with objects that represent Chiang’s authoritarian regime and Taiwan’s days of White Terror, as many Taiwanese see Chiang’s Nationalist Party as a settler/immigrant regime from China to Taiwan. I applied discourse analysis when treating the ‘exhibitionary complex’ (Bennett 1995) as text and analysed the narratives with elements of exhibited objects, written descriptions, and audio text. Data sources include museum annual reports, website information, newsletters, news reports, official publications, museum statements, and interviews with the curator and participating artists. Through literature reviews and interviews with museum staff, curators and several participating artists, I demonstrate how the efforts of the independent curator and artists opened up a variety of narratives of Taiwan, despite the nature of the Memorial Hall’s relationship to authoritarian history. In so doing, the Memorial Hall not only reads the concept of migration in a positive way in a time when labour migrants and marriage migrants are viewed negatively but also unveils its potential in providing a different approach to discuss human rights and anti-authoritarian practices and shared experiences and goals.

Keywords:

• Taiwan
• Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall
• transnational justice
• Family Memo
• contemporary art

Notes

1 ‘The immediate story begins on February 27, when agents from the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau confiscated a cigarette vendor’s illegal cigarettes as well as her money, and then beat her over the head with a pistol while attempting to arrest her. A large crowd swarmed the agents, prompting one to open fire on the crowd, killing one person. The incident led to mass protests the next day—February 28.’ (Shattuck 2017)

2 ‘The period immediately following the 228 Incident is known as the White Terror for the massive suppression, murder, and imprisonment of political dissidents, or anyone who the Kuomintang (KMT), perceived as a threat to its one-party rule. The Martial Law that was implemented in the aftermath of the incident was not lifted until 1987. Due to a massive cover-up and the destruction of government documents, no one knows exactly how many people died. Some estimates are as high as 28,000 or as low as 18,000.’ (Shattuck 2017)

3 The term ‘new immigrants’, or ‘new residents’, refers to labour migrants (primarily marriage migrants) from China and Southeast Asia starting in the 1990s.

4 In most cases these are Chinese mainlanders who migrated to the island with Chiang Kai-shek ’s authoritarian government. According to historian and memory studies scholar Dominic Yang (2020), there has been a noticeable decrease in the percentage of Mainlanders who claim the ethnic label of Mainlanders in recent surveys. This is mainly due to the prevailing popular perception of this ethnic group as a privileged ruling class or a group of ‘colonisers’ of Taiwanese people.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Shih Chang

Susan Shih Chang holds a MA in Museum Studies from Taipei National University of the Arts and a PhD in Cultural Studies in Asia from the National University of Singapore. Her fields of interest include museums and nationalism, modern migration, subject making, and identity politics in postcolonial Taiwan.