Demo-Art : Culture Plasticizing Movement n.0 Now
Demo-Art : Culture Plasticizing Movement n.0 Now
2021.11.05~2022.02.06
10:00 - 17:00
Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts,1-2F
Gilles DELEUZE in his most important work, Difference and Repetition (French: Différence et répétition), inquired: what is beginning? Such a simple yet profound question it is, for beginning is not a starting point nor a source, but a crack in time. What a crack in time brings forth is the occurrence of thinking, a story about change. A “crack in time” in reality starts from any political moment. In modern times, it is the moment of “democratization” and “liberation.” Then, it is the extrusion emerges as cultural accumulation encounters change of external condition, like the Japanese colonial period, the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan, the Four Asian Tigers, and the lifting of the martial laws. Through formal conversion, art has been committed to social communication and connection. It is not “folk art” that preserves traditions or collects antiques. Instead, it is “demo–art” that catalyzes local communities into malleable democratic venues: democratic art. In comparison, a beginning often denotes “serendipity” in Buddhism, the occurrence of relation. If they are situated in the imagination of becoming, “relation” and “serendipity” are to give rise to the formal or qualitative changes for individual existence. To intervene consciousness and drive this becoming is to operate “plasticity.” Hence, the essentiality of cultural plasticizing lies in that culture is not just the greatest common denominator in the development and accumulation of human history but also in the intricate, diversified interactions, connections, and confrontations of mankind. There are also heterogenous forces at play that drive changes of culture now and then. These heterogenous forces are the so-called “creative forces,” while the property to constantly generate heterogeneity internally is the plasticity (malleability) of culture.

In what condition does “culture” require a change or plasticization? Where “culture” is no longer a mere habitus accumulated in communities, nor the perceived forms the habitus presents, “culture” is more of a variable ecological network that contains society, logistics, information, intellectual influences, political tensions, colonial dominance, sentimental sharing. We could even claim that “culture” comes with the deconstructive composition of “rhizome (A Thousand Plateaus).” Even though the fixed habitus are distributed all over the rhizome, “culture” is like an earthly neural network. As such, “culture” always preserves the cracks and extra time that the dominated or the colonized are able to touch the world, accumulate works and energies, and preserve themselves. That is, “culture” comes with the “malleability” of life, i.e. the plasticity (malleability) of “culture.” Therefore, “cultural plasticizing,” different from the culture and creativity that appropriates folk or cultural symbols for “reproduction” of political correctness or ideology, is a “radical” cultural force in the status of “para-colonization” that has to constantly drive the updates of the basic works of culture. Culture plasticizing movement is not limited to the “historical event” of a certain moment, but the tension betwixt the national sentiment and alien colonizers in the Japanese colonial period, the subjective anxiety trapped in the New China and Free China after the severance of diplomatic ties between Taiwan and USA, the productive understanding under the cultural dominance entering the information society and liberalized market, and even the subject construction between the independent awareness and the national image, among other statuses of “para-colonization.” It is the “intensive impulsion” under surdétermination that persistently reoccurs in history. Thus, “cultural plasticizing movement” is the commitment and endeavor to transcend beyond the intensive impulsions now and again, the “dis-colonization” that dissolves the power of dominating violence.

Starting from the Taiwan Culture Association, “speech” in various forms had been conducted prior to the division of the association in 1927. The “speech” was the fundamental undertaking aiming to awaken the thinking and consciousness of the colonized public. “Culture” meant “literacy” and “enlightenment,” while the political economy involved was primarily the inequality under the colonial policies. At the end of the 1970s, the art scene expounded, advocated, and put into actions “the cultural plasticizing” via means “across-domains” that even could not have been named. Either the retracing of YU Dagang’s connections with local culture and artistic presentation or the direction of art and culture SHI Sung and CHIANG Hsun invested in Lionart Magazine, it was Mr. WANG Chun-Yi that proposed the outlines of “cultural plasticizing works” in Lionart Magazine and Chiang that elevated the cultural plasticizing works into “cultural plasticizing movement” in Cactus Magazine. It was not doubt a crucial establishment and conceptual development that bridged the 1970s and 1980s. Although Chiang held on to the ideal pursuit of “nominalism” for “culture” somehow, the effect and impulsion of the “cultural colonization” by the West could be experienced already. Nevertheless, the “culture” here was evidently no longer the indicator of certain literacy or some awakening. Instead, it was the venue for voices Wang sought to create. It was an idea of ecology concerning the departure from multi-colonization (para-colonization) and the creation of local experience mechanism. The works of cultural plasticizing thus became the practice of the political economy of culture. One thing worthy of attention is that their writing and thinking at the time were indeed rooted in Taiwan, capturing the ecological implications of “culture” in terms of history and politics.

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the Taiwan Culture Association, while denotes the half century mark since the proposition of the cultural plasticizing works. Amidst the rhythmic intensive impulsion of Taiwan, it seems we can employ the thinking and practice of “cultural plasticizing” to envisage the possibility and meaning of art from the perspective and scale of ecology. The accumulation and development of the regional culture went through impacts of the colonial period and the World Wars, the ideology in the Cold War and standardization of the economic production chain, as well as the utter commercialization in globalization. The growing and exchange relation of culture have been truncated and intervened by “para-colonization” repeatedly. In other words, our knowledge and practice of “culture” has been always detached from the ecological realm of human society. As far as Taiwan that went through multiple colonial dominances is concerned, such status can be seen as a disaster that “perpetually resurges” to challenge the development of art and culture in Taiwan. Hence, the thinking of restarting the “cultural plasticizing works” today endeavors to recapture the ecological relations derived from culture. To delve into the “cultural plasticizing works,” designer HO Chia-Hsing and I engaged certain amount of reading concerning design, history, and philosophy. He even formed the Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team with Prairie WWWW and several young individuals, conducting certain degree of research into temples, coinage, and folk design following the clues Mr. CHEN Mingchang had shared. Meanwhile, Writing FACTory explores the development and possibility of thinking and writing in the contemporary art revolving around the two research axes of minority politics and cultural movements. Be that the collaborative dossier exhibition with various history-related organizations (e.g. Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation and Su Beng Education Foundation) or the research in writing and publishing on the Southeast Asia and Latin America, they have exhibited the “cultural plasticizing” endeavors amidst the connections across countries and cultures.

Reginal culture in the cross-cultural ecological network, or the rhizome neural network of culture, has always been part of the cultural ecology. Therefore, the “plasticizing” works of culture should not be limited to the geological or symbolic frameworks in the region. Instead, the reginal culture ought to be seen as a node in the cultural ecology, while “cultural plasticizing work” or the “plasticity” of culture is the production and work capable of creating “malleability” in cultures and cultural relations. Just as Catherine Malabou proposed: plasticity is an open crack in thinking. She used sculpture and contemporary art to distinguish “take form” and “give form.” This thinking dynamic’s relation with art plasticizing appears to be too much of a concept, nevertheless. We should place this pursuit in “culture,” in a venue that constantly keeps “devenir-à-venir.” In other words, “plasticizing” is to foster cracks in culture with the forces of thinking and sentiment. A crack is not for “severing” or “fracturing” of modernism or of free market, but to find clues of neural network in the original soil or to find the understanding of relational tension in para-colonization, just like the fundamental force of microorganisms on soil that renders soil plasticity, granting our spiritual consciousness plasticity. In this exhibition, we can see how Writing FACTory introduces the rethinking of the contents within the surging social movements of the Taiwan Culture Association via “A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island.” It achieves the outcomes of “plasticizing” via “speech,” divided into four speech actions, i.e. image, incident, drama, and publication, so that we may recapture the profound meaning of the Taiwan Culture Association once again via Jacques Rancière’s “aesthesis.” We can also observe how Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team and HO Chia-Hsing continue to advance from the corporality of writing and tracing of lines to the composition of colors and spatial venues after research while shed light on the key meaning of “collaboration” in terms of culture. Through their efforts, the works of “cultural plasticizing” fully expounded that “region” and “relation” are forces of femininity that shall sustain the “micropolitics” that “nourishes soil for centuries,” setting in motion the incessant “dis-colonization.”
Gilles DELEUZE in his most important work, Difference and Repetition (French: Différence et répétition), inquired: what is beginning? Such a simple yet profound question it is, for beginning is not a starting point nor a source, but a crack in time. What a crack in time brings forth is the occurrence of thinking, a story about change. A “crack in time” in reality starts from any political moment. In modern times, it is the moment of “democratization” and “liberation.” Then, it is the extrusion emerges as cultural accumulation encounters change of external condition, like the Japanese colonial period, the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan, the Four Asian Tigers, and the lifting of the martial laws. Through formal conversion, art has been committed to social communication and connection. It is not “folk art” that preserves traditions or collects antiques. Instead, it is “demo–art” that catalyzes local communities into malleable democratic venues: democratic art. In comparison, a beginning often denotes “serendipity” in Buddhism, the occurrence of relation. If they are situated in the imagination of becoming, “relation” and “serendipity” are to give rise to the formal or qualitative changes for individual existence. To intervene consciousness and drive this becoming is to operate “plasticity.” Hence, the essentiality of cultural plasticizing lies in that culture is not just the greatest common denominator in the development and accumulation of human history but also in the intricate, diversified interactions, connections, and confrontations of mankind. There are also heterogenous forces at play that drive changes of culture now and then. These heterogenous forces are the so-called “creative forces,” while the property to constantly generate heterogeneity internally is the plasticity (malleability) of culture.

In what condition does “culture” require a change or plasticization? Where “culture” is no longer a mere habitus accumulated in communities, nor the perceived forms the habitus presents, “culture” is more of a variable ecological network that contains society, logistics, information, intellectual influences, political tensions, colonial dominance, sentimental sharing. We could even claim that “culture” comes with the deconstructive composition of “rhizome (A Thousand Plateaus).” Even though the fixed habitus are distributed all over the rhizome, “culture” is like an earthly neural network. As such, “culture” always preserves the cracks and extra time that the dominated or the colonized are able to touch the world, accumulate works and energies, and preserve themselves. That is, “culture” comes with the “malleability” of life, i.e. the plasticity (malleability) of “culture.” Therefore, “cultural plasticizing,” different from the culture and creativity that appropriates folk or cultural symbols for “reproduction” of political correctness or ideology, is a “radical” cultural force in the status of “para-colonization” that has to constantly drive the updates of the basic works of culture. Culture plasticizing movement is not limited to the “historical event” of a certain moment, but the tension betwixt the national sentiment and alien colonizers in the Japanese colonial period, the subjective anxiety trapped in the New China and Free China after the severance of diplomatic ties between Taiwan and USA, the productive understanding under the cultural dominance entering the information society and liberalized market, and even the subject construction between the independent awareness and the national image, among other statuses of “para-colonization.” It is the “intensive impulsion” under surdétermination that persistently reoccurs in history. Thus, “cultural plasticizing movement” is the commitment and endeavor to transcend beyond the intensive impulsions now and again, the “dis-colonization” that dissolves the power of dominating violence.

Starting from the Taiwan Culture Association, “speech” in various forms had been conducted prior to the division of the association in 1927. The “speech” was the fundamental undertaking aiming to awaken the thinking and consciousness of the colonized public. “Culture” meant “literacy” and “enlightenment,” while the political economy involved was primarily the inequality under the colonial policies. At the end of the 1970s, the art scene expounded, advocated, and put into actions “the cultural plasticizing” via means “across-domains” that even could not have been named. Either the retracing of YU Dagang’s connections with local culture and artistic presentation or the direction of art and culture SHI Sung and CHIANG Hsun invested in Lionart Magazine, it was Mr. WANG Chun-Yi that proposed the outlines of “cultural plasticizing works” in Lionart Magazine and Chiang that elevated the cultural plasticizing works into “cultural plasticizing movement” in Cactus Magazine. It was not doubt a crucial establishment and conceptual development that bridged the 1970s and 1980s. Although Chiang held on to the ideal pursuit of “nominalism” for “culture” somehow, the effect and impulsion of the “cultural colonization” by the West could be experienced already. Nevertheless, the “culture” here was evidently no longer the indicator of certain literacy or some awakening. Instead, it was the venue for voices Wang sought to create. It was an idea of ecology concerning the departure from multi-colonization (para-colonization) and the creation of local experience mechanism. The works of cultural plasticizing thus became the practice of the political economy of culture. One thing worthy of attention is that their writing and thinking at the time were indeed rooted in Taiwan, capturing the ecological implications of “culture” in terms of history and politics.

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the Taiwan Culture Association, while denotes the half century mark since the proposition of the cultural plasticizing works. Amidst the rhythmic intensive impulsion of Taiwan, it seems we can employ the thinking and practice of “cultural plasticizing” to envisage the possibility and meaning of art from the perspective and scale of ecology. The accumulation and development of the regional culture went through impacts of the colonial period and the World Wars, the ideology in the Cold War and standardization of the economic production chain, as well as the utter commercialization in globalization. The growing and exchange relation of culture have been truncated and intervened by “para-colonization” repeatedly. In other words, our knowledge and practice of “culture” has been always detached from the ecological realm of human society. As far as Taiwan that went through multiple colonial dominances is concerned, such status can be seen as a disaster that “perpetually resurges” to challenge the development of art and culture in Taiwan. Hence, the thinking of restarting the “cultural plasticizing works” today endeavors to recapture the ecological relations derived from culture. To delve into the “cultural plasticizing works,” designer HO Chia-Hsing and I engaged certain amount of reading concerning design, history, and philosophy. He even formed the Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team with Prairie WWWW and several young individuals, conducting certain degree of research into temples, coinage, and folk design following the clues Mr. CHEN Mingchang had shared. Meanwhile, Writing FACTory explores the development and possibility of thinking and writing in the contemporary art revolving around the two research axes of minority politics and cultural movements. Be that the collaborative dossier exhibition with various history-related organizations (e.g. Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation and Su Beng Education Foundation) or the research in writing and publishing on the Southeast Asia and Latin America, they have exhibited the “cultural plasticizing” endeavors amidst the connections across countries and cultures.

Reginal culture in the cross-cultural ecological network, or the rhizome neural network of culture, has always been part of the cultural ecology. Therefore, the “plasticizing” works of culture should not be limited to the geological or symbolic frameworks in the region. Instead, the reginal culture ought to be seen as a node in the cultural ecology, while “cultural plasticizing work” or the “plasticity” of culture is the production and work capable of creating “malleability” in cultures and cultural relations. Just as Catherine Malabou proposed: plasticity is an open crack in thinking. She used sculpture and contemporary art to distinguish “take form” and “give form.” This thinking dynamic’s relation with art plasticizing appears to be too much of a concept, nevertheless. We should place this pursuit in “culture,” in a venue that constantly keeps “devenir-à-venir.” In other words, “plasticizing” is to foster cracks in culture with the forces of thinking and sentiment. A crack is not for “severing” or “fracturing” of modernism or of free market, but to find clues of neural network in the original soil or to find the understanding of relational tension in para-colonization, just like the fundamental force of microorganisms on soil that renders soil plasticity, granting our spiritual consciousness plasticity. In this exhibition, we can see how Writing FACTory introduces the rethinking of the contents within the surging social movements of the Taiwan Culture Association via “A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island.” It achieves the outcomes of “plasticizing” via “speech,” divided into four speech actions, i.e. image, incident, drama, and publication, so that we may recapture the profound meaning of the Taiwan Culture Association once again via Jacques Rancière’s “aesthesis.” We can also observe how Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team and HO Chia-Hsing continue to advance from the corporality of writing and tracing of lines to the composition of colors and spatial venues after research while shed light on the key meaning of “collaboration” in terms of culture. Through their efforts, the works of “cultural plasticizing” fully expounded that “region” and “relation” are forces of femininity that shall sustain the “micropolitics” that “nourishes soil for centuries,” setting in motion the incessant “dis-colonization.”
On the Mysterious Self-Shackled Island the Benshi Makes Noises
On the Mysterious Self-Shackled Island the Benshi Makes Noises
Team Intro
Writing FACTory
Project Description
The project title was inspired by the author named Ignorance in “A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island,” a novel published in Taiwan in 1923. The novel was essay about an individual visiting to “Self-shackled Island” on the Eastern Sea in a trance. On the island, be that a woman or a gentleman, each of them wears a shackle bearing the word of “self-shackled.” The traveler inquired a gentleman on the island isn’t it nice if he is liberated from that strange ornament. The gentleman raged and told the traveler that this is something everyone longs for, so how would one want liberation from it? With that neck accessory, “To begin with, it makes people eat no food despite hunger and wear no clothes despite coldness. Secondly, it allows one to labor without exhaustion and be insulted without shame. Thirdly, it allows us to acquire no new knowledge and learn no new trends of thoughts.”
The year 1923, when the novel was published, was also the year the Peace Act Incident took place. After Japan adopted “the Extension of the Mainland Law Policy,” it marked the shift of the major mean of resistance by the Taiwanese to a non-violent approach. Facing the colonial home country that upheld the big banners of “fusion of Japanese and Taiwanese” and “equal treatment,” many movements and associations on the table no longer appealed to politics since the 1920s. Instead, they emerged as cultural groups, such as the numerous academic societies, art societies, sports societies, study groups, among other groups. Just as the Record of Police Reform in the Office of the Taiwan Governor-General, these groups with enlightenment as the main contents, despite their rich characteristics of cultural activities, their appearances and contents were varied out of the tactical needs. Among all the “political associations that are not political associations,” the cultural practices carried out by the Taiwan Culture Association (TCA) emerged as the most brilliant case. The literati learned that armed resistance was no longer viable and felt the crisis brought by the assimilation policy. In light of the Taiwanese with a school attendance rate less than 30 percent then, the goals of the TCA included not just the resistance against the colonial reign but also the resistance against the “old culture of feudalism” with modern knowledge and enlightenment. To achieve these two goals contradictory to each other at times, the TCA utilized multiple idea communication tools. Through the cross-media organizational actions, it created a unique space for speech in the history of Taiwan. Facing different targeted audience from cities to villages, the TCA chiseled out countless pores in the strict colonial reign via practices of newspaper publication, news reading clubs, cultural lecture event, general lecture event, film screening, cultural theatre, and so on.
“On the Mysterious Self-Shackled Island the Benshi Makes Noises” shall center around the multiple cultural practices of the TCA with “Benshi”(弁士, orators or narrators) at the core. As visitors enter the exhibition, they will see “Benshi” played by theater actors, conducting the “impromptu localization” of A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island (1923). Next, with the sequel of A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island, four interlocking sub-topical exhibition sections, “Speak within Image,” “Speak within Theatre,” “Speak within Publishing,” and “Speak within Event,” are unveiled to delve into the transformation of “Benshi” – or “speakers.” In the sequel of A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island, Ignorance visited Self-Shackled Island again, observed the political turmoil, and interviewed the islanders, the gentleman, the Might Guards with Yellow Scarf, and the Patriarch on the island. The four short stories written in the first-person point of view correspond to the speech topics introduced respectively by the four sub-topical exhibition sections. The addition of the fables is expected to supplement the political context behind the abovementioned practices, offering an alternative mean to dossier reading. Meanwhile, in this year that marks the one hundredth anniversary of the TCA establishment, it sheds light on how the TCA, through its operation with various speech techniques, built a machine of enlightenment embedded with a feedback mechanism on the “Self-Shackled Island” where independent thinking is increasingly impossible.

Research Consultants|
Mamie Misawa
Shih Wan-Shun
Writing Partners|
Yunyu “Ayo” Shih
Tseng Po-Hao
Actor|
Wei Chun-Chan
Cinematography|
Lee Yi-Cheng
Lin Yong-Yi
Post-Production|
Onez Production
Special Thanks|
Lin Chang-Feng
Chuang Ming-Cheng
Chiang Wei-shui's Cultural Foundation


Writing FACTory
Writing FACTory is a long-term project, a non-site space and a virtual factory producing discourse, research and printed matter concerning writing/publishing as artistic and political practice. Initiated by Taiwanese artist Chang Wen-Hsuan in 2018, this ‘FACTory’ serves as an entrepot of experiences and discourses. Writing in this sense is not only a technique of operating words in specific field but the most efficient way to accomplish political, aesthetical and other practices. Its practices include field survey, annual meeting on writing, workshop and archive interpretation.

Mamie MISAWA
Born in the Osaka Prefecture, Japan, in 1964, after graduating from the Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Mamie Misawa worked in the publishing industry before she went to Taiwan for further studies. She graduated from the M.A. Program at the Department of History, National Taiwan University in 1999 and earned the credits in the Post-doctorate Program at the Department of Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo in 2004. Formerly a visiting research assistant to 21st-Century COE Programme, Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Misawa serves as a professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Culture, College of Humanities and Sciences, Nihon University. In 2006, she obtained her PhD from the University of Tokyo with The Loci of Colonial Taiwanese Film Activities: Negotiations and Cross-Border Politics. Misawa’s publications include: The Screen in Colony: Study of the Cinema Policy of the Taiwanese Governor’s Office (1895-1942) (2002), Betwixt the “Imperial State” and the “Mother State”: Negotiations and Trans-border of Taiwanese Film Workers during the Japanese Colonial Period (Lee, Wen-Ching & Hsu, Shih-Chia, Trans. 2012), and multiple theses.

Shi Wan-Shun
With a doctorate degree from the School of Theatre, Taipei National University of the Arts, Shih Wan-Shun serves as Associate Professor at the Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University. Her academic areas of expertise include history of Taiwanese theatre, modern theatre, and theatre historiography. In the duration of the Little Theatre Movement in the 1980s-90s, she mainly produced and performed at the Zero Field 121.25 Experimental Theatre Troupe. Also, Shih engaged in productions of films and documentaries, worked as a screenwriter, and was a winner of Excellent Screenplay Awards (2005) by the Government Information Office, Executive Yuan. Her publications include Staging ‘Taiwan’: Theatre, Modernization, and Subjectivity Formation of Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial period (PhD thesis, 2010), among many other papers, as well as Profound Quiescence in Bustling Tumult: Zhou Yi-Chang’s Theatre Art and Social Practices (Bookman Books, 2021) and so on.

Yunyu “Ayo” Shih
Yunyu Ayo Shih (b. 1985) currently lives and work in Taipei. He graduated from National Taiwan University with a BA in History in 2007 and School of The Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Sculpture in 2014. Shih’s work has always related closely to the space he situated; In Taipei, a city he lived in for ten years, he turn a whole building into the subject of his art. While he is constantly moving and relocating, his works are stored in suitcases and become archives, documents, and books that tells different stories. He frequently explores different appearances of memorial and memory while at the same time involving interactions between himself and state apparatus. Instead of posing a confrontational gesture, he tends to choose coexistent or penetrated attitudes to explore gray areas.

Tseng Po-Hao
TSENG started learning Chinese musical instruments and music at a young age and encountered art and traditional Taiwanese music during university. In recent years, TSENG has participated in theater and collaborated in instrument and singing performances with Assignment Theatre, Against-Again Troupe, and Kocyonanten Butoh Dance Group. TSENG has also participated in various improvised performances and performed alongside musicians such as UCHIHASHI Kazuhisa, LEE Shih-Yang, Immanuel Danennbring, CHANG Hei-Sheng, SAKAMOTO Hiromichi, LI Tzi-Mei, and free improvisation group I Am Not Yours(CHINO Shuichi, LIN Hui-Chun, and Marie), and Lan Cao + Gregor Siedl. TSENG's recent creative endeavors are wanderings in music, attempting to understand the concept of "presence" in performances. TSENG's Ghost Forum Project explores the problem of multiple narratives and the colonial situation during the resistance against Japan, while his music works are mostly related to social issues and personal sentiments.

Wei Chun-Chan
Graduated from Graduate Institute of Theatre Performance in Taipei National University of Arts (NTUA), Chun-Chan Wei currently holds the position of the artistic director of One Player Short Ensemble, instructor in the Department of Theatre Arts in NTUA and lecturer in the Dance Department in Chinese Culture University. As an artist, Chun-Chan Wei is equipped with extremely keen observation and sensibility. Through his selecting, every kind of events, characters and issues can be a material for performance, in which he extracts the essence of what he observes from this kind of “daily creative-practices”, and goes further to excavate social issues and evaluate social value systems. Therefore, he can show his reflection, question and dialectical thinking on the existence of human.

For English version and experts from two interviews with research consultants please see:

https://www.changwenhsuan.com/self-shackled-island
On the Mysterious Self-Shackled Island the Benshi Makes Noises
Writing FACTory
Project Description
The project title was inspired by the author named Ignorance in “A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island,” a novel published in Taiwan in 1923. The novel was essay about an individual visiting to “Self-shackled Island” on the Eastern Sea in a trance. On the island, be that a woman or a gentleman, each of them wears a shackle bearing the word of “self-shackled.” The traveler inquired a gentleman on the island isn’t it nice if he is liberated from that strange ornament. The gentleman raged and told the traveler that this is something everyone longs for, so how would one want liberation from it? With that neck accessory, “To begin with, it makes people eat no food despite hunger and wear no clothes despite coldness. Secondly, it allows one to labor without exhaustion and be insulted without shame. Thirdly, it allows us to acquire no new knowledge and learn no new trends of thoughts.”
The year 1923, when the novel was published, was also the year the Peace Act Incident took place. After Japan adopted “the Extension of the Mainland Law Policy,” it marked the shift of the major mean of resistance by the Taiwanese to a non-violent approach. Facing the colonial home country that upheld the big banners of “fusion of Japanese and Taiwanese” and “equal treatment,” many movements and associations on the table no longer appealed to politics since the 1920s. Instead, they emerged as cultural groups, such as the numerous academic societies, art societies, sports societies, study groups, among other groups. Just as the Record of Police Reform in the Office of the Taiwan Governor-General, these groups with enlightenment as the main contents, despite their rich characteristics of cultural activities, their appearances and contents were varied out of the tactical needs. Among all the “political associations that are not political associations,” the cultural practices carried out by the Taiwan Culture Association (TCA) emerged as the most brilliant case. The literati learned that armed resistance was no longer viable and felt the crisis brought by the assimilation policy. In light of the Taiwanese with a school attendance rate less than 30 percent then, the goals of the TCA included not just the resistance against the colonial reign but also the resistance against the “old culture of feudalism” with modern knowledge and enlightenment. To achieve these two goals contradictory to each other at times, the TCA utilized multiple idea communication tools. Through the cross-media organizational actions, it created a unique space for speech in the history of Taiwan. Facing different targeted audience from cities to villages, the TCA chiseled out countless pores in the strict colonial reign via practices of newspaper publication, news reading clubs, cultural lecture event, general lecture event, film screening, cultural theatre, and so on.
“On the Mysterious Self-Shackled Island the Benshi Makes Noises” shall center around the multiple cultural practices of the TCA with “Benshi”(弁士, orators or narrators) at the core. As visitors enter the exhibition, they will see “Benshi” played by theater actors, conducting the “impromptu localization” of A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island (1923). Next, with the sequel of A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island, four interlocking sub-topical exhibition sections, “Speak within Image,” “Speak within Theatre,” “Speak within Publishing,” and “Speak within Event,” are unveiled to delve into the transformation of “Benshi” – or “speakers.” In the sequel of A Mysterious Self-Shackled Island, Ignorance visited Self-Shackled Island again, observed the political turmoil, and interviewed the islanders, the gentleman, the Might Guards with Yellow Scarf, and the Patriarch on the island. The four short stories written in the first-person point of view correspond to the speech topics introduced respectively by the four sub-topical exhibition sections. The addition of the fables is expected to supplement the political context behind the abovementioned practices, offering an alternative mean to dossier reading. Meanwhile, in this year that marks the one hundredth anniversary of the TCA establishment, it sheds light on how the TCA, through its operation with various speech techniques, built a machine of enlightenment embedded with a feedback mechanism on the “Self-Shackled Island” where independent thinking is increasingly impossible.

Research Consultants|
Mamie Misawa
Shih Wan-Shun
Writing Partners|
Yunyu “Ayo” Shih
Tseng Po-Hao
Actor|
Wei Chun-Chan
Cinematography|
Lee Yi-Cheng
Lin Yong-Yi
Post-Production|
Onez Production
Special Thanks|
Lin Chang-Feng
Chuang Ming-Cheng
Chiang Wei-shui's Cultural Foundation


Team Intro
Writing FACTory
Writing FACTory is a long-term project, a non-site space and a virtual factory producing discourse, research and printed matter concerning writing/publishing as artistic and political practice. Initiated by Taiwanese artist Chang Wen-Hsuan in 2018, this ‘FACTory’ serves as an entrepot of experiences and discourses. Writing in this sense is not only a technique of operating words in specific field but the most efficient way to accomplish political, aesthetical and other practices. Its practices include field survey, annual meeting on writing, workshop and archive interpretation.

Mamie MISAWA
Born in the Osaka Prefecture, Japan, in 1964, after graduating from the Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Mamie Misawa worked in the publishing industry before she went to Taiwan for further studies. She graduated from the M.A. Program at the Department of History, National Taiwan University in 1999 and earned the credits in the Post-doctorate Program at the Department of Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo in 2004. Formerly a visiting research assistant to 21st-Century COE Programme, Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Misawa serves as a professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Culture, College of Humanities and Sciences, Nihon University. In 2006, she obtained her PhD from the University of Tokyo with The Loci of Colonial Taiwanese Film Activities: Negotiations and Cross-Border Politics. Misawa’s publications include: The Screen in Colony: Study of the Cinema Policy of the Taiwanese Governor’s Office (1895-1942) (2002), Betwixt the “Imperial State” and the “Mother State”: Negotiations and Trans-border of Taiwanese Film Workers during the Japanese Colonial Period (Lee, Wen-Ching & Hsu, Shih-Chia, Trans. 2012), and multiple theses.

Shi Wan-Shun
With a doctorate degree from the School of Theatre, Taipei National University of the Arts, Shih Wan-Shun serves as Associate Professor at the Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University. Her academic areas of expertise include history of Taiwanese theatre, modern theatre, and theatre historiography. In the duration of the Little Theatre Movement in the 1980s-90s, she mainly produced and performed at the Zero Field 121.25 Experimental Theatre Troupe. Also, Shih engaged in productions of films and documentaries, worked as a screenwriter, and was a winner of Excellent Screenplay Awards (2005) by the Government Information Office, Executive Yuan. Her publications include Staging ‘Taiwan’: Theatre, Modernization, and Subjectivity Formation of Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial period (PhD thesis, 2010), among many other papers, as well as Profound Quiescence in Bustling Tumult: Zhou Yi-Chang’s Theatre Art and Social Practices (Bookman Books, 2021) and so on.

Yunyu “Ayo” Shih
Yunyu Ayo Shih (b. 1985) currently lives and work in Taipei. He graduated from National Taiwan University with a BA in History in 2007 and School of The Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Sculpture in 2014. Shih’s work has always related closely to the space he situated; In Taipei, a city he lived in for ten years, he turn a whole building into the subject of his art. While he is constantly moving and relocating, his works are stored in suitcases and become archives, documents, and books that tells different stories. He frequently explores different appearances of memorial and memory while at the same time involving interactions between himself and state apparatus. Instead of posing a confrontational gesture, he tends to choose coexistent or penetrated attitudes to explore gray areas.

Tseng Po-Hao
TSENG started learning Chinese musical instruments and music at a young age and encountered art and traditional Taiwanese music during university. In recent years, TSENG has participated in theater and collaborated in instrument and singing performances with Assignment Theatre, Against-Again Troupe, and Kocyonanten Butoh Dance Group. TSENG has also participated in various improvised performances and performed alongside musicians such as UCHIHASHI Kazuhisa, LEE Shih-Yang, Immanuel Danennbring, CHANG Hei-Sheng, SAKAMOTO Hiromichi, LI Tzi-Mei, and free improvisation group I Am Not Yours(CHINO Shuichi, LIN Hui-Chun, and Marie), and Lan Cao + Gregor Siedl. TSENG's recent creative endeavors are wanderings in music, attempting to understand the concept of "presence" in performances. TSENG's Ghost Forum Project explores the problem of multiple narratives and the colonial situation during the resistance against Japan, while his music works are mostly related to social issues and personal sentiments.

Wei Chun-Chan
Graduated from Graduate Institute of Theatre Performance in Taipei National University of Arts (NTUA), Chun-Chan Wei currently holds the position of the artistic director of One Player Short Ensemble, instructor in the Department of Theatre Arts in NTUA and lecturer in the Dance Department in Chinese Culture University. As an artist, Chun-Chan Wei is equipped with extremely keen observation and sensibility. Through his selecting, every kind of events, characters and issues can be a material for performance, in which he extracts the essence of what he observes from this kind of “daily creative-practices”, and goes further to excavate social issues and evaluate social value systems. Therefore, he can show his reflection, question and dialectical thinking on the existence of human.

For English version and experts from two interviews with research consultants please see:

https://www.changwenhsuan.com/self-shackled-island
Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team
Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team
Gilles DELEUZE inquired: what is beginning? The beginning is not a starting point nor a source, but a crack in time. What a crack in time brings forth is the occurrence of thinking : change. A “crack in time” in reality starts from any political moment. In modern times, it is the moment of “democratization” and “liberation.” Then, it is the extrusion emerges as cultural accumulation encounters change of external condition. Through formal conversion, art has been committed to social communication and connection. It is “demo–art” that catalyzes local communities into malleable democratic venues: democratic art.

At the end of the 1970s, either the retracing of YU Dagang or the direction of art and culture SHI Sung and CHIANG Hsun, it was Mr. WANG Chun-Yi that proposed the outlines of “cultural plasticizing works” in Lionart Magazine and Chiang that elevated the cultural plasticizing works into “cultural plasticizing movement”. The “culture” was the venue for voices Wang sought to create. It was an idea of ecology concerning the departure from multi-colonization (para-colonization) and the creation of local experience mechanism. The works of cultural plasticizing thus became the practice of the political economy of culture. Thus, “cultural plasticizing movement” is the commitment and endeavor to transcend beyond the intensive impulsions now and again, the “dis-colonization” that dissolves the power of dominating violence.
Monsoon Plasticizing Culture Work Team
Gilles DELEUZE inquired: what is beginning? The beginning is not a starting point nor a source, but a crack in time. What a crack in time brings forth is the occurrence of thinking : change. A “crack in time” in reality starts from any political moment. In modern times, it is the moment of “democratization” and “liberation.” Then, it is the extrusion emerges as cultural accumulation encounters change of external condition. Through formal conversion, art has been committed to social communication and connection. It is “demo–art” that catalyzes local communities into malleable democratic venues: democratic art.

At the end of the 1970s, either the retracing of YU Dagang or the direction of art and culture SHI Sung and CHIANG Hsun, it was Mr. WANG Chun-Yi that proposed the outlines of “cultural plasticizing works” in Lionart Magazine and Chiang that elevated the cultural plasticizing works into “cultural plasticizing movement”. The “culture” was the venue for voices Wang sought to create. It was an idea of ecology concerning the departure from multi-colonization (para-colonization) and the creation of local experience mechanism. The works of cultural plasticizing thus became the practice of the political economy of culture. Thus, “cultural plasticizing movement” is the commitment and endeavor to transcend beyond the intensive impulsions now and again, the “dis-colonization” that dissolves the power of dominating violence.
 Back
Share to
繁中 /  EN
繁中 / EN