Southeast Asian New Immigrant-Themed Contemporary Art as an Approach to Anti-Authoritarian Practices at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taiwan

Abstract

This article examines the exhibition Family Memo-Island of Memory and Migration: Southeast Asia New Immigrant-Themed Contemporary Art (11 May–26 August 2018) at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan. As part of the institution’s transnational justice exhibition, Family Memo was the first and only exhibition to feature South East Asian culture and issues of immigration—especially migrant workers and marriage migrants. This topic created a veiled dialogue with objects that represent Chiang’s authoritarian regime and Taiwan’s days of White Terror, as many Taiwanese see Chiang’s Nationalist Party as a settler/immigrant regime from China to Taiwan. I applied discourse analysis when treating the ‘exhibitionary complex’ (Bennett 1995) as text and analysed the narratives with elements of exhibited objects, written descriptions, and audio text. Data sources include museum annual reports, website information, newsletters, news reports, official publications, museum statements, and interviews with the curator and participating artists. Through literature reviews and interviews with museum staff, curators and several participating artists, I demonstrate how the efforts of the independent curator and artists opened up a variety of narratives of Taiwan, despite the nature of the Memorial Hall’s relationship to authoritarian history. In so doing, the Memorial Hall not only reads the concept of migration in a positive way in a time when labour migrants and marriage migrants are viewed negatively but also unveils its potential in providing a different approach to discuss human rights and anti-authoritarian practices and shared experiences and goals.