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.”