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Art Histories of a Forever War

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/17432197-10434363

1751-7435

Kathleen Ditzig, Fang-Tze Hsu,

Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation

Art Histories of a Forever War is an exploration of modern art in postwar Taiwan and its enduring resonances. To understand this historical milieu, the exhibition unpacks and contextualizes Taiwan's modern art as part of a Cold War convergence of art, design, and technology.1 On a global scale, and in relation to the American military-industrial complex and its attendant neo-imperialism (Immerwahr 2020: 13–144), the post–World War II and early Cold War period of the 1940s–60s has been described as “a period of accelerated commercialization, of decolonization and—in the context of advanced aesthetic practice and thought—of considered reassessment of the effects and legacies of the modernist avant-garde” (Martin 2005: 4). Modernity in this period was transformed by wartime techno-scientific developments and the competition for cultural supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union.From the design of boardrooms to visual anthropology to cultural exchange programs based on the belief that art could be a medium for building diplomatic understanding, cultural production in this period was motivated by an interest in shaping human subjectivity. While pertinent to American art history,2 these policies had a global effect: the Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union to ideologically determine what progress and modernity meant for the world had an effect on how these ideas were employed in campaigns to win “hearts and minds” (Krenn 2005). In this way, the exhibition's reference to the Cold War is not a simple periodization demarcating the period after World War II; instead, the Cold War symbolizes a worlding process of imaginatively and technologically modulating oneself as part of an international competition to define what was “modern.”To further elaborate, we unpack the argument via three interconnected sections of the exhibition. “Cosmotechnics after Space” interrogates the specific cosmotechnics of modern art practices in Taiwan in light of the technological developments that arose out of the space race, such as satellite photography and the moon landing. Cosmotechnics, a term coined by philosopher Hui Yuk, refers to the unification of moral and cosmic orders through craft or art making.3 In this view, art practices, like tools and technology, do not just produce things but are world-making processes.“Global Domestic” focuses on the emergence of a shared global experience mediated through home appliances and crafts. This thread takes an expanded view of how art and craft from Taiwan, supported by American economic aid as a strategy to strengthen Taiwan's economic development and to develop them for export, contributed to the construction of a “global domestic.”“Aesthetic Networks of a Free World” examines the internationalization projects of Taiwan's modern artists in this period. The free world, a phrase often used in propaganda, refers to the Western bloc and the network of countries allied with the United States. The Republic of China in Taiwan, being the “free face of China,” represented one of the front lines of the Cold War. This geopolitical position afforded artists in Taiwan exceptional opportunities to develop their artistic practices across the free world, and it colored the reading and development of aesthetic movements associated with artists from Taiwan. Even as the US Information Service advocated for art communities in Taiwan and championed them as the “ideal” Chinese modernism internationally, Taiwan's modern artists navigated these opportunities. They developed their own international communities and definitions of modern art.For instance, the exhibition illustrates this point with several canonical works from the Punto International Art Movement (fig. 9), including Li Yuan-Chia's Untitled 16 (1963), Untitled 17 (1963), and Untitled 18 (1963). Produced during Li's engagement with Punto International Art Movement in Italy, these three folding-scroll pieces embody Li's integration of the “spatial and temporal freedom of Western abstract” with his training in Chinese calligraphy, especially in his use of brushstrokes (Hsiao 1991: 358). This body of work has been well received and discussed by art communities in Taiwan. While the exhibition explores Taiwan's modern art through these three distinct threads, it is essential to keep in mind that these themes are to be read in terms of conjunctural dynamics. Cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey's (2010: 57) notion of conjuncture refers to a “period during which different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape,” producing a crisis. By situating these themes within a conjunctural analysis, the exhibition promotes an examination of the complex entanglements of this historical period and privileges the agency of the artist in navigating their sociopolitical context and writing history on their own terms.Nowhere is this curatorial approach of intervening into a global history of a “forever war” more apparent than in the reappearance of several artists across themes. These artists include Chin Sung, Han Hsiang-Ning, Yang Yuyu, Lee Shi-Chi, and Chen Chi-Kwan. The inclusion of work from different moments in their artistic career not only facilitates an expanded art-historical reading of their individual artistic evolution but also renders visible the conceptual ties between themes. This is exemplified by the double bill of Chen Chi-Kwan in “Cosmotechnics after the Space Race” and in “Global Domestic.”4 The first, Ninety-Degree Curves (1967), depicts Chen's memory of a flight during his military service in 1944. This nearly two-meter-long ink painting actualizes an aerostatic vision through classical Chinese ink painting techniques. It offers a poetic counterpoint to the scientific visuality represented by the reproductions of NASA photographs and posters displayed in the same gallery.“Global Domestic” features Chen's Yin Yang No. 2 (1985), a 5.5-meter-long painting mounted in the format of a hand scroll that resembles an imaginary journey into a siheyuan (Chinese courtyard house) in Yunnan.5 Unlike traditional Chinese landscape painting, which emphasizes the exteriority of a scene through elaborate brushwork and composition, Yin Yang No. 2 actualizes an interior structure that is both physical and metaphysical. The painting is meant to be viewed from left to right, situating the domestic as a microcosm of the wider world, and thus extending the visual narrative of traditional Chinese ink painting. On the one hand, the painting encapsulates how the correlation between spaces in a siheyuan epitomizes the social order of traditional Chinese society by demarcating spaces with symbolic household items without merely relying on walls. On the other hand, by situating the interior of the siheyuan between mountains and lakes, Chen creates a synchronicity between the domestic rhythm of time expressed by the unfolding spaces of the siheyuan and the cosmic passage of time embodied by the flowing water and the sun and moon. The shifts in how Chen employed modern perspectives, from the aerial to the domestic layout, in his attempts to represent worlds speak to generational shifts and the enduring resonances of this historical period on how artists, such as Chen, saw and depicted this milieu in their works. Beyond just privileging the agency of the artist and the historical context in which they work, such a curatorial approach allows for a larger, more expansive historical scale through which to consider Taiwan's modern art as a lens onto a moment in global history—a moment that still resonates in our contemporary lives.A week before the opening of Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home (2021) at the Taipei Fine Art Museum (TFAM), the heightened tension between the Republic of China in Taiwan (ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) played out in the global news cycle. With the failure of the democracy movement in Hong Kong, the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and US president Joe Biden vowing to defend Taiwan, current events in the weeks leading up to the exhibition promised the revival of the Cold War tensions represented in the exhibition. Thus the specter of the Cold War uncannily formed a backdrop to the opening of Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home, an exhibition that explored and historicized the artistic pursuit of modernism in Taiwan and its neighboring regions from the 1950s to the 1970s (Hunnicutt 2021).The location of TFAM, in this light, exaggerated the historicity and timeliness of the exhibition. Opened on August 8, 1983, TFAM is Taiwan's first purpose-built exhibition space for modern art.6 Located at the former site of the United States Taiwan Defense Command,7 TFAM's founding vision and its mandate to develop a national collection made it a house of modernism and a literal by-product of the Cold War. The museum embodies the confluence of Taiwan's aesthetic aspiration to modernism at the tail of the martial law era and a Cold War military and industrial complex that produced global modernism.Considering this larger context, this article is a curatorial reflection on the exhibition, Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home (2021), as a cultural object that was a product of the Cold War—in being commissioned by and being sited at TFAM—as much as it was an interrogation of the Cold War in Taiwan. The exhibition took Taiwan's modern art as a lens to situate the historiography between modernism and the Cold War, pointing to the ideological contours and networks that have shaped postwar regionalism and cultural production. Presenting contemporary artworks and archival material alongside modern artworks from TFAM's collection and collections from other museum institutions across Taiwan, the exhibition not only attempted to triangulate the development of modern art in Taiwan as part of a larger Cold War regional and global milieu but also sought to expand our understanding of the Cold War, as more than just a historical period but also a historical process still unfolding in the very present. How does this exhibition fit into the prevailing scholarship on Cold War historiography? How does such an exhibition—and more generally, curatorial research—carve out a discursive space for engaging research and the complex legacies of the region? What are the stakes of an exhibition that seeks to explicate the inheritance of our contemporary understanding of modern art, given the geopolitical landscape today? In fleshing out the curatorial research and stakes that define Art Histories of a Forever War, this article acknowledges the format of the exhibition as a medium of cultural production that bears a reflexive interrogation of Cold War legacies.We have now come to acknowledge the multivalence of the Cold War beyond the conventional depiction of antagonism between two superpowers—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America—in the post–World War II era, and its larger impact beyond the realm of international politics. In the academic field, the gradual declassification of the archives of the Cold War superpowers has resulted in a surge in publications and conferences around the subject matter. However, this surge of scholarly interest in the Cold War has developed in concurrence with several shifts and turns. Geopolitically speaking, the research emphasis has moved from the Atlantic-centered perspective of John Lewis Gaddis to other narratives addressing regional specificities beyond the Euro-American continents (Berger 2004). For instance, in resonance with Odd Arne Westad's (2005) argument regarding the proactive role played by third-world countries in altering the dynamics of the Cold War arena (see also McMahon 2013; Radchenko and Kalinovsky 2011), the transregional picture of “intercontinental synchronization of hostilities” that is suggested in Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture, coauthored by Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (2009: 3), has extended Cold War studies from the global North to the global South.Epistemologically speaking, Melvyn P. Leffler's (1994) suggestions that we understand the historical event of the Cold War from linguistic and cultural perspectives have also paved the way for the subsequent cultural turn.8 By examining the Cold War as a “cultural phenomenon” (Fousek 2003: 150), scholars with transdisciplinary awareness about the Cold War have started to investigate the political implications of transnational cultural programs and cultural productions. Various scholarly attempts to broaden, widen, and deepen the understanding of the contemporaneity of the Cold War are going beyond the approach of making sense of the past to inquire into the relevance of the Cold War in the present. Not only have these distinctive junctures of historical research with other fields of studies drastically destabilized the initial historiography formulated by military historians, but these shifted sites of inquiry—addressed from below and from the challenges of peripheries—interrogate our assumptions about what the Cold War is and has been about.Indeed, the subject of the Cold War has blossomed into a transdisciplinary field of study, particularly the convergence between aesthetics, technology, and ideology. In Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital, literature scholar Bhakti Shringarpure (2019: 20) notes that the theoretical trope of assemblage enables “multiple vantage points to co-exist and illustrates that we remain in the grip of a tenacious Cold War imaginary.” Focusing primarily on literary works concerning the discourse of postcolonality and violence, Shringarpure's work rejects the project of history being linear and dichotomous but favors the longue durée in order to discuss the historical continuum between the old form of colonialism and its rearticulation in “[turning] the post-colony into a warscape” (3).9 Here, the notion of war requires further unpacking. On the one hand, Shringarpure's notion of war is an episteme of violence from within the postcolonial subjects and with multiple fronts. From the violence of civil wars to the violence on art and literature, violence presents itself through ideological warfare in modes of reframing and potential erasure, whether of identity or a heterogeneous imagination of aesthetic subjects.Art Histories of a Forever War extends on Shringarpure's idea of the assemblage and war. The former borrows from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's definition of the assemblage as a multiplicity unified by “co-functioning”—“alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind” (20; quoted from Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 69). The exhibition along these lines is an assemblage because the relations that it brings up are not linear but correlational at best. Aesthetics often functions as a loose logic that sketches out the rationale of this period—one defined by the banal violence of the Cold War—and how this violence extends into the contemporary.Art Histories of a Forever War foregrounds modern art masterpieces housed in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, including the works of Li Yuan-Chia (1929–94), Chin Sung (1932–2007), Liu Kuo-Sung (1932–), Hsiao Chin (1935–), Lee Shi-Chi (1938–2019), and Han Hsiang-Ning (1939–), as well as those outside the collection, by modernist architects Wang Da Hong (1917–2018) and Chen Chi-Kwan (1921–2007). It highlights a pioneering generation of artists who relocated to Taiwan after World War II and urgently sought to develop a language of modern art that defined Chineseness. At once local and international in their visions, these artists and their works were at times employed toward legitimizing the Republic of China in Taiwan within the cultural and political landscape of the Cold War. Yet they were fundamentally interstitial actors, whose culture production eludes any singular narrative. The exhibition unpacks the complexity of this historical milieu through three distinct but intersecting themes: “Cosmotechnics after Space,” “Global Domestic,” and “Aesthetic Networks of a Free World.” These themes reflect a period of global history (the 1940s–70s) in which art, design, and technology converged in the service of war. Through signposting the cultural actors from Taiwan and the region, who navigated and shaped the culture at the time, these themes bring together asynchronous timelines, correlating events, and logics that are bound together by the complexity of the Cold War.In turn, this complexity and nuance are represented spatially by the “assemblage” of archival material, modern and contemporary art, and the site of the building itself. The exhibition produces an experience of moving through space and tuning in to the relations of the milieu through objects of the time and artworks from the museum's collection . In this respect, as curators and scholars committed to recuperating lesser-known accounts of non-Western artists actively navigating Cold War frameworks (Hsu 2016; Hsu 2019; Ditzig 2020, 2021), the particular locale and history of TFAM inspired us as curators to question the historical entanglements between innovations of war and modern art. How can Taiwan's modern aesthetic discourse and its institutionalized modernism be reconsidered in light of the museum's location at a former US military installation? How do we culturally live with the legacies of war? The exhibition is an assemblage just as much as it represents a Cold War milieu as an assemblage. Moreover, it offers potent vantage points that recuperate certain historical discourses that would be less apparent in other formats. The exhibition itself theorizes the Cold War's regional specificity, by attempting to decentralize the United States as the singular world power in the reading of the Cold War and instead focusing on Taiwan's modern art as an alternative point of entry to this historical narrative and as an interlocutor with contemporary art.What is important to note about this historical period in which modernity was being transformed by wartime techno-scientific developments is the global yet intimate scale of transformation that accompanied the emergence of the military-industrial complex (Thompson 1989).10Military-industrial complex is a term used by outgoing US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his exit speech in 1961. He warned the American people against the unwarranted influence of the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry. Corporations vying for defense contracts in the 1950s and government agencies that administered them relied on public relations to construct a narrative of their seemingly self-evident necessity.This phenomenon brought to light the overlaps between the marketplace and geopolitics: The Cold War was in part sustained by an emergent economy of war.11 Elaborating on this relationship, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato (2018: 251) in Wars and Capital state that the “subject” of the Cold War was “none other than globalized capitalism, which in its military-financial constitution, merges with the war machine of capital.” Through the control of money and military power, the United States was able to produce what they call a “Golden Age of Capitalism,” which was also a regime of biopower that systematically regulated civil society and ways of life through class divisions of labor and value, along the lines of race and gender.While Alliez and Lazzarato apply this largely to American society, the expansive neo-imperial reach of the United States in the postwar years, as well as the active interventions and assistance regimes in the decolonizing world at the time, meant that this was not wholly a domestic or national project but one that was fundamentally a worlding project.12 The military-industrial complex arguably created the conditions for the Cold War and the cycles of war around the world, which have defined a global culture of a forever war. And, from time to time, art histories are punctuated with boycotts of arts funding linked to the sale of arms.13The phrase forever war was coined by American author Joe Haldeman and used in the title of his 1974 military science fiction novel. In both popular and scholarly discourse today, the term is used in reference to the US war on terror,14 and it is endemic to the long legacy of a systemic process of othering that “[assaults] the human sensorium for citizens, subjects, survivors, and refugees of US empire” (Kapadia 2019: 9). By appropriating the multiversal, transnational, and transhistorical term forever war to examine the confluence of art, design, and technology in Taiwan's modern art and its continued resonance in contemporary art, the exhibition sets out to demarcate a global register that moves beyond American exceptionalism. It drops the singularity of the forever war while expanding the historiography of art from the perspective of the everyday condition of war.How do we understand and interrogate the resonance of this historical period on the contemporary, other than reflecting on the museum's location at the site of a former military installation? Presented alongside the modern artworks and punctuating the exhibition are archival case studies on Cold War cultural diplomacy and exchange between Taiwan's modern artists and the world, as well as contemporary research-based artworks by Erika Tan (Singapore/United Kingdom), Sung Tieu (Vietnam/Germany), Maria Taniguchi (Philippines), Chen Yin-Ju (Taiwan), Prajakta Potnis (India), Doris Wong Wai Yin (Hong Kong), Writing FACTory (Taiwan) in collaboration with Joy Ho (Singapore) and Joanne Ho (Singapore), and Yee I-Lann (Borneo).These works point to the enduring legacies of this historical period and explicate the lacunas of “modern” history by fleshing out the complexities of lesser-known moments of Taiwan's modern art history, and by foregrounding the artistic and technological traditions born of war that still define our daily life. Through the discursive relationship between modern and contemporary artworks, the exhibition offers Taiwan's modern art as a lens to read global art history. It emphasizes the visual legacies that contemporary artworks share with Taiwan's modern art as well as the interrogations of historical trajectories that grew out of the innovations and lived anxieties of both the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century. The selection of contemporary art practices focused on domestic and personal family histories and was attentive to reflexive interrogations of the inheritances of contemporary artists. They present a determined attempt to grapple with the ellipses and lacunas of the forever war's regime of biopower that emphasizes the national and the geopolitical at the expense of personal agency.To bring these artworks together in discussion is a fundamentally “insurgent” feminist gesture. As posited by queer studies scholar Ronak K. Kapadia (2019: 17) in his exploration of insurgent aesthetics shared by contemporary artistic practitioners with Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic backgrounds, the artworks enable us to recognize the regime of state surveillance and their “affective afterlives” beyond the seemingly abstract notion of war. The kind of aesthetic language that Kapadia theorizes results from militarized surveillance cultures and the dominant presence of wartime logistics in our contemporary life. Yet his analysis can be extended here to consider not only the gaps but also the synchronicities that the works of Taiwan's modern artists and contemporary artists from East and Southeast Asia share.Yet this notion that war is an episteme of violence from within the postcolonial subjects and with multiple fronts, which defined the subject matter of the exhibition, was also one that we considered reflexively in relation to this research being undertaken in light of and in relation to the exhibitionary format. In 1994, the anthropologist David H. Price declassified a report written by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in one of his last duties working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The report laid out a postwar future for the OSS in India and South Asia15. It set out recommendations for a long-term view of cultivating effective allies that the USA could rely on. An important aspect of this was Bateson's discussion of exhibitionism and spectatorship as a way of ordering human relations.Bateson ([1942] 1987) wrote about exhibitionism and spectatorship in “Morale and National Character” as facets of child-rearing and as defining aspects of national character—or the personalities of people of specific nations. He delineates a difference between children raised in the United States who are encouraged to perform or exhibit their uniqueness to their parents and children raised in the UK who are instead encouraged to be spectators who review and emulate what their parents present to them. By the time of his report in 1944, Bateson had extended this idea to the power dynamics of making cultural displays. He referenced the Russian policy of managing cultural minorities: The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native reviva[l]ism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.” (Bateson memo)Through this outline, Bateson delineates how when cultural display is encouraged, its political potency can be mitigated to prevent it from undermining the postwar world order that the United States sought to develop. He makes it apparent that encouraging the display of culture—of which exhibitions are one form—and thus enabling and guiding an Indigenous culture to self-define is important for managing and directing social and political movements. Price (1998: 382) notes that these directives foreshadow a general strategy of psywarfare undertaken by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actors in the region, such as Edward Landsdale, in which “indigenous legitimate leaders were subdued by the polite attentions of institutions and persons connected to intelligence agencies.” Moreover, Price speculates that, because Bateson's report was found in the CIA and not the OSS archives, Bateson's ideas were probably applied by the CIA, the postwar intelligence organization that replaced the OSS.What does such a covert cultural policy mean for the way we view exhibitions produced during the Cold War and the legacies of cultural production of this period? What does this, in turn, mean for an exhibition like Art Histories of a Forever War, which features Cold War exhibitions and exhibitionary projects? Asian Artists in Crystal (1956–58) was a cultural exchange traveling exhibition that was based on drawings by modern artists from Asia that were collected by the curator Karl Kup of the New York Library (Steuben Glass 1956). These drawings were then translated into crystal by American craftsmen from the Steuben Glass company. The project, which was a form of American cultural diplomacy by a private corporation, the US State Department, and cultural organizations, produced a series of crystals that were put on display in the United States and around the world. Copies were gifted to the countries where the artists came from. For Art Histories of a Forever War, the exhibition presented crystals by modern Taiwanese artists alongside the exhibition promotional material and a propaganda film, restaging a section of the exhibitionary dynamics of the original exhibition. Art Histories of a Forever War (Ditzig and Hsu 2022) also afforded the opportunity to present archival research by Ifan Chen on the Southeast Asia Rehabilitation and Trade Exhibition (1956), an exhibition held in New York. The trade exhibition presented design objects and artwork from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia that were assembled by the American designer Russel Wright and produced out of a US aid program to promote the development of craft and design that could be exported and sold in the US market as a way to economically benefit a US constellated Southeast Asia. Presented as part of a broader constellation of Taiwanese modern art and other forms of US propaganda about technological advancement and the space race, the exhibitions mobilized within Art Histories of a Forever War were framed as part of a larger Cold War milieu wherein military and cultural developments produced art networks. In turn, the exhibition is a call for a greater reflexivity in implicitly encouraging viewers to consider how these exhibitions produced subjectivitie