Curatorial abstraction and the re-animation of the cold war: the re-emergence of an exclusive report on Taiwanese media

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of museums and galleries by considering the case of the exhibition The Wild Eighties: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. It traces two layers of abstraction of the documentary How History Was Wounded: An Exclusive Report on Taiwanese Media—by reporters and curators—to argue that curatorial abstraction is a violence of simplification that facilitates the extension of the cold war into the post-cold war world. It does so by first considering the historical context in which the documentary emerges. It then shifts focus toward the context of the exhibition in which it was placed. By placing it in such an erasing way, The Wild Eighties can hail a unified Taiwanese consciousness that simultaneously extends the cold war into post-cold war capitalist social relations.