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Abstract
In 2018, the artist Chen Ting-Jung (b 1985) manufactured a sound installation that reclaimed the Beishan Broadcast Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan. Constructed in 1967, the wall’s seventeen loudspeakers broadcast political propaganda across a narrow stretch of water to the People’s Republic of China for three decades. In recognition of the sonic Cold War, Chen stripped down this fortress into its rudiments: a horizontal arc of speakers, playing one of Taiwanese cultural icon Teresa Teng’s famous solo pieces. She titled the installation You Are the Only One I Care About (Whisper).
This article explores this reclamation, where the questions about the exploitation of female labour and the aestheticisation of the female voice confront the aurality of the Cold War. I argue that the female voice became a specific site of production during the sonic combat between the Taiwan Strait. Most importantly, I investigate how Chen’s intervention is both a feminist critique and a form of sonic resilience that is open to different political possibilities.
Notes
1 This sound installation was commissioned by Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna as part of the 2018 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, which Chen Ting-jung won. As part of the exhibition ‘Keep Me Close to You’, curated by Lucas Gehrmann – the museum’s chief curator – the work was installed in the Kunsthalle’s modernist glass gallery and exhibited alongside Quick Code Service, a thirty-two-minute video work by another prizewinner, Hui Ye (b 1981).
2 The Cold War between the Kuomintang regime (KMT) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can be roughly dated to the years between late 1955 and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. It arose partly as the result of the intervention of the US, which followed a policy of containment and provided the KMT with military assistance as a defence against Communist influence. The political combat between the two parties over who would represent China remained cool between the artillery strike of the First Taiwan Strait Crisis’ (1954–1955) and the expansion of the sonic infrastructure for waging aural contest, ie psychological warfare. This sonic combat was halted in 1992 as Kinmen was relieved from its warzone status following the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. For a comprehensive survey of this sonic history, see Lin Guo-sian, ‘The Formation of the Propaganda Institution for Reconquering the Mainland in the 1950s’, doctoral dissertation, National Cheng-Chi University, 2009, pp 141–192, and for further discussion of the work, see Walter L Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961, Macmillan Press, London, 1997.
3 The Beishan Broadcast Wall propagated its message through loudspeakers using soundwaves and needed to be located high up on the coast in order for its messages to be heard across a short stretch of water in Mainland China. There were also four radio stations in Kinmen (Guisahn Beach, Mashan, Dadan, and Hojingtou) that transmitted their propaganda slogans via radio waves, which can travel long distances.
4 Chen Ting-jung, interviewed by the author, New York, 14 January 2020
5 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Bloomsbury, New York, 2015, p 81
6 Julia Byron-Wilson, ‘Hard Hats and Art Strikes: Robert Morris in 1970’, The Art Bulletin, vol 89, no 2, June 2007, p 338
7 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, part 2, Artforum, vol 5, no 2, October 1966, p 21
8 Byron-Wilson, ‘Hard Hats’, op cit, p 342
9 Chen Ting-jung, interviewed by the author, New York, 14 January 2020
10 Chou Cheng-yu, A Voice to Your Heart, Fan-chih, Taipei, 2010, p 79
11 By borrowing the term ‘affective’, I am thinking in line with Marxist feminists, in particular Kathi Weeks, Angela McRobbie and Sianne Ngai. They define the notion of ‘affective labour’ or ‘feminised labour’ as an immaterial and yet intense work embedded in certain skills and attributes that are historically associated with women and their role in social reproduction, such as housework, caring or services. Though affective/feminised labour is generally considered a component of the post-Fordist capitalist society, what I attempt to theorise here is a historically variable condition of affective labour in Taiwan that predates the post-Fordist capitalist economy and the stimulus from the Cold War sonic combat. For Marxist feminist discussions of social reproduction and immaterial labour, see Kathi Weeks, ‘Life within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics’, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, vol 7, no 1, January 2007, pp 233–249, and Angela McRobbie, ‘Reflections on Feminism and Immaterial Labour’, New Formations 70, pp 66–72. For feminised labour, see Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012, pp 206–211.
12 Theodor W Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Continuum, New York 1982, p 277
13 Hsu Yen-shueh, interviewed by Lin Mei-hua, in Lin Mei-hua, ‘Listening to the Sound of a Battlefield: Broadcasting in Wartime Kinmen, 1949–1992’, Master’s thesis, National Kinmen Institute of Technology, 2009, p 230
14 It should be noted that the development of the audio infrastructure in the postwar period occurred because of this sonic contest with the PRC. The postwar radio network stemmed from the competition for radiowave frequencies under the guidance and support of the US. For a comprehensive study of the development of audio infrastructure in postwar Taiwan, see Lin Guo-sian, The Sound of Taiwan: The Ninety-year History of Radio Taiwan International, Wunan Publishing, Taipei, 2019, p 78–101.
15 Based on a job advertisement for female broadcasters in Jheng ci jhong hua 正氣中華, 19 August 1957, National Library of Public Information
16 In an interview, one of the broadcasters, Tong Li-mei, distinguishes between their roles as slogan shouters and hosts of radio programmes (news reporting or counter-information). ‘We were responsible for reading the script provided by the Ministry of Defense; we gave no names, and we did not have to mention who we were. We talked directly to the Mainlanders, and we didn’t need names since we were merely the voice machine.’ See Lin Mei-hua, ‘Listening to the Sounds of a Battlefield’, p 46.
17 Chen Zhiping, interviewed by Lin Mei-hua, in Lin, ‘Listening to the Sounds of a Battlefield’, op cit, p 121
18 K C Li, American Diplomacy in the Far East, 1942–43, vol 5, Li, New York City, 1942, p 403
19 Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911–1945, Random House, New York, 2017, p 446
20 Lu Fang-shang, ‘The Charm of Radio Broadcasting: Madame Chiang’s Public Speech in the US’, Modern China 151, October 2002, p 40
21 Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Birth of Modern China, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009, p 847
22 The words of an unnamed reporter in Laura Tyson Li, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek: China’s Eternal First Lady, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2006, p 204
23 Ibid
24 Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle of Modern China, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p 233
25 Yu Chien-ming, ‘Benefactor or Victim: Taiwanese Women in the Second World War’, in Ikujo Ko, ed, Gender and Power, National Taiwan University Press, Taipei, 2020, p 23
26 Lin, ‘Listening to the Sound of a Battlefield’, op cit, p 56
27 Lin, ‘Listening to the Sound of a Battlefield’, op cit, p 173
28 Donna Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991, p 35
29 Teng Ron-ron, interviewed by Lin Mei-hua, in Lin, ‘Listening to the Sounds of a Battlefield’, op cit, p 121
30 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, University of Duke Press, Durham, 2000, p 24
31 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media, op cit, p 44
32 Lin, ‘Listening to the Sounds of a Battlefield’, op cit, p 52
33 Andrew F Jones, Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2020, pp 187–191
34 For a discussion of the view from the other side of the Taiwanese Strait on the vocal representation of political authority, see M Paulina Hartono, ‘A Good Communist Style: Sounding like a Communist in Twentieth Century China’, Representations 151, July 2020, pp 26–50.
35 Zhou Yinchang, ‘How to View Popular Songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan?’, in Editors from People’s Music Press, eds, How to Distinguish Yellow Music, People’s Music Press, Beijing ,1982, pp 9–27
36 Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014, p 105 (italics in original)
37 Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, ‘Poetische Klanglandschaft’, Wiener Zeitung, 12 April 2018, https://www.tagblatt-wienerzeitung.at/nachrichten/kultur/kunst/1006188-Kunsthalle-Preis-fuer-Ting-Jung-Chen-und-Hui-Ye.html, accessed 9 November 2023
38 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath, trans, Hill and Wang, New York, 1978, p 182, italics in original
39 Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, op cit, p 183
40 Zhou, ‘How to View Popular Songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan?’, op cit, p 24–27
41 Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, op cit, p 182
42 Jones, Circuit Listening, op cit, p 192
43 In the Chinese context, the colour yellow has connotations of decadence and pornography. This meaning is imposed not merely in printed materials but also in music. It can imply that both the tone and the singing voice are intrinsically salacious. For comprehensive research on ‘yellow music’, see, for example, Andrew F Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2001.
44 Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, op cit, p 182
45 Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2018, p 29