Taiwanese Art Research Articles

The Past and Future of Taiwanese Art：A Look Back over the Past 100 Years

From the Japanese colonial period to the present, the question, “What is Taiwanese art?” has been asked over and over again, and a clear answer has yet to be found. This is not only a search for identity but is also rooted in the pain of Taiwan’s history, as artists address the shifting national borders and the nation state of Taiwan. In the past few years, several important exhibitions of Taiwanese art have been held. The study of Taiwanese art history, which had been a rather minor academic field, has gradually gained momentum. Today, many art historians are attempting to depict Taiwan from the perspective of the island and the many ethnic groups and foreigners who reside there. Furthermore, since many Taiwanese artists and scholars have studied and researched in Japan for over a century now, the study of Taiwanese art history will hopefully develop more actively not only in Taiwan but also in Japan.

Art, violence and memory in Taiwan

Taiwan is a liminal site of modernity in Asia. It is a modern exemplar as a liberal democracy with a developed economy, but is mostly unrecognized as a nation-state in the international system. In its liminality, however, it traces contours of modern power and their epistemological expression. This paper presents an account of Taiwan as an object of knowledge and representation in instances of scholarship and policy, Taiwanese politics, urban development and art, arguing that the narratives through which Taiwan is understood embed a lived experience as Taiwanese under forms of epistemological domination. The paper then explores Taiwanese responses of co-option and resistance in alternative sites of knowledge, and it concludes that the critical unexamined force in Taiwan’s experience of modernity is violence.

물체 · 신체 · 형체 - 1970년대 대만 현대미술의 시각 변형

Recently, a discourse that studies on Taiwanese art history of the 1970s were continuity and expansion of postwar ‘Modern Pictorial Arts Movement’ in many aspects began. Under the background of local history movement in the 1970s, abstraction forming modernism was realized and developed for the arts such as modern sculpture, pottery and photograph. At that time, the world of art was changed from abstraction form to actual materials through the most of works for the regret and judgment of modernism. Furthermore, it was changed to inherent concept of Taiwanese art under the political marital system at that time.BR This thesis examined how Taiwanese world of art has expressed the form of object, body and figure by contemporary art after the modernism since the middle of the 1960s. It can be discovered in ‘Modern times’ discussed by Li zhongsheng(李仲生, 1912-1984), a pioneering leader of Taiwanese modern painting and his modernism is relatively closed to prewar historic avant-garde art center. As it focuses on individuality, anti-academism and non-perspective visual centrism, new avant-garde appeared after the 1960s also can explore the concept, ‘realities’ of materiality, again and it is the newest sign of modern world as a solution of formalism accepted to Li zongsheng.BR From the middle of the 1960s to the 1970s, modernism is main in Taiwanese world of art, but corruption and transgression of modernism can be found in moving of ‘sacred’ form, deformation, spectatorship of anti-painting, form of physical ego, transformation of object, etc. Therefore, while the experiment in difficulties in naming went through the common important accident, Taiwanese modern art converted alien expression of concept, system and environment to contemporary.

Problematising multicultural art education in the context of Taiwan

In this paper I reflect on the experience of working with Taiwanese art educators. The data I revisit comes from participation in four art education conferences between 1995 and 2001, a three‐month period of residence at Changhua University of Education teaching a master's programme, three intensive summer programmes organised for Taiwanese art teachers in London and doctoral supervision. In these reflections I consider what these experiences have taught me about multicultural art education and pedagogy in Taiwan, their key characteristic and some East–West differences. I conclude that multicultural art education reform in Taiwan is distinctive in the way it engages both with homeland studies and global visual culture. The absence of national sovereignty means that Taiwanese art teachers are ideally placed to experiment with post‐modern developments in art curriculum practice.