Contested Territories

ORPhan
of ASiA

Project for Contested Territories

and presented at the exhibition "In/tangible"

in SEESAW Manchester, UK

With our roots of Indigenous tribes, ancient Chinese culture,

Japanese education and our own culture that developed on the island,

Taiwan is a place full of different mixture of cultures.
Yet, politically we are like an orphan on the edge of Asia,
left on the Pacific Ocean, never had enough time to developed

identity before we were abandoned, once again.

This project is about the memory pieces of Taiwan,

of every inch of the land,
of every ocean tides,

of every single soul on this island.

Taiwan belongs to Taiwanese.

Taiwanese were mysteriously disappearing every day.

Caught in the vicissitudes of history, divided internally
— exactly as Japanese “higher politics” has envisioned
— Taiwanese were facing their greatest crisis in modern times.

“You see the forces of history carrying away everything,

and you can’t join any of them.

Let’s say you manage to convince yourself one way or the other.

You won’t convince anyone else; everyone’ll think you’re a spy.

Come to think of it, you’re a sort of misfit, aren’t you?”

(Chuo-Liu Wu 吳濁流 , Orphan of Asia, 1946)

This project aims to use fashion and visualized artwork to elaborate the concept of the cultural identity confusion of Taiwanese people. It is an important issue in the sensitive situation of cross-strait relations nowadays, but the confusion of Taiwanese identity did not appear in the past decade but can be traced back since the early 20th century.

This project borrowed the title of the important novel that Chuo-Liu Wu ( 吳濁流 ) wrote in 1945 in Taiwan during the colonization of the Japanese. " Orphan of Asia" ( アジアの孤児 ) is a book that elaborated the confusion of an young Taiwanese man feeling not Japanese, Chinese nor Taiwanese. Later on in 1983 , singer Ta-yu Lo ( 羅大佑 ) used the same title to publish a song that described how Taiwanese people lived under the white terror of the Chinese Nationalist Government and the fear of the Communist Party of China.

Taiwanese people have always been the orphan of Asia, and the cultural identity confusion of Taiwanese is caused by a series of historical events and political decisions. The following pages of sketchbook scans show the research of the complex minds of the identity recognition of Taiwanese people since the early 20th century. We can see how identity confusion formed in the simple daily activities of Taiwanese people, from school education, fashion trends to daily diet due to the political decisions of different governments, alongside the major events that occurred such as war, protest and student movements. The research was divided into four different eras of the history of Taiwan: Mainland Japan extension(1919-1937), The Kominka Movement(1937-1945), Arrival of the R.O.C Government (1949-1990), Post-white terror (1990-), each indicated different set of minds of cultural identity confusion forming under the complex historical background and how it affected the daily lives of people living on the island.

台湾は ...... 我等台湾人の台湾である

台灣是台灣人的台灣

Taiwan belongs to Taiwanese

(Pei-Huo Tsai 蔡培火 , 我島と我等 , 1920)

Design methods of the project are as follows:
-Using blue and white china( 青花瓷 ) as the reference of story telling and memory keeping.
-By tracing the edges of broken ceramic to create shapes of memory pieces, and transfer them into memory pieces of the historical major events that defined the identities of Taiwan. -Using cyanotype printing to print the historical photos on to fabrics, and create the blurry blue images.
-Mix the details of traditional Chinese blouse and Kimono into the pattern of garment, referencing the cultural identity confusion of Taiwanese.