Art Histories of a Forever War

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 with the legacies of The exhibition is an assemblage just as much as it a Cold War milieu as an it offers vantage points that historical that be apparent in other The exhibition itself the Cold regional by to the United States as the singular world in the reading of the Cold War and on Taiwan's modern art as an point of to this historical narrative and as an with contemporary is to about this historical period in which modernity was being transformed by wartime techno-scientific developments is the global scale of that the emergence of the military-industrial complex complex is a term used by US in his in the American the of the of an military and a for in the 1950s and that them on relations to a narrative of their to light the between the and The Cold War was in part by an of on this and in and that the of the Cold War was other than which in its with the war of Through the of and military the United States was to produce what they a of which was also a of that civil society and of through of and along the lines of and and this to American the expansive of the United States in the postwar as well as the and in the world at the time, meant that this was not a domestic or national project but one that was fundamentally a worlding The military-industrial complex the for the Cold War and the of war around the world, which have defined a global culture of a war. from time to time, art are with of to the of phrase war was coined by American Joe and used in the of his military In both and scholarly discourse the term is used in reference to the US war on and it is to the of a process of that the human for and of US By the and term war to the confluence of art, design, and technology in Taiwan's modern art and its resonance in contemporary art, the exhibition out to a global that beyond American It the of the war the historiography of art from the perspective of the of do we understand and the resonance of this historical period on the other than on the museum's location at the site of a former military installation? alongside the modern artworks and the exhibition are archival studies on Cold War cultural and exchange between Taiwan's modern artists and the world, as well as contemporary artworks by Sung Chen Yin in with and and works point to the enduring legacies of this historical period and explicate the of history by fleshing out the of lesser-known moments of Taiwan's modern art and by the artistic and technological of war that still define our Through the discursive between modern and contemporary the exhibition offers Taiwan's modern art as a lens to read global art It emphasizes the visual legacies that contemporary artworks with Taiwan's modern art as well as the of historical that out of the innovations and of both the and wars of the The of contemporary art practices on domestic and and was to reflexive of the of contemporary They a to with the and of the of that emphasizes the national and the geopolitical at the of bring these artworks together in is a fundamentally by studies scholar (2019: in his exploration of shared by contemporary artistic with and the artworks us to the of and their beyond the notion of war. The of aesthetic language that from and the of wartime in our contemporary Yet his can be extended to consider not only the but also the that the works of Taiwan's modern artists and contemporary artists from and this notion that war is an episteme of violence from within the postcolonial subjects and with multiple which defined the subject of the exhibition, was also one that we considered in relation to this research being in light of and in relation to the In the a by the in one of his for the of The out a postwar for the in and It out for a view of that the could of this was of and as a way of human about and in and as of and as of national the of of specific a between in the United States who are to or their to their and in the who are to be who and what their to By the time of his in had extended this idea to the dynamics of making cultural the of cultural The which has been in the of relations between and is the of their in The of this very the that it is very to the and the In what the have is to the to a revival they the and other of literature, and the same of is extended to in production or In to the of as a and the to in order to out how things be we that in the up the The is developed and the revival of literature, a for use the . . . on the other hand, the the as a is much more and the be used the this how cultural is its political can be to it from the postwar world order that the United States sought to it apparent that the of which are one thus and an culture to is for and social and political notes that these a strategy of by actors in the region, such as in which were by the of institutions and to because was in the and not the ideas were by the the postwar that the does such a cultural for the way we view produced during the Cold War and the legacies of cultural production of this What does in turn, for an exhibition like Art Histories of a Forever War, which features Cold War and in was a cultural exchange exhibition that was based on by modern artists from that were by the of the These were into by American from the The which was a form of American cultural by a the US and cultural produced a of that were on in the United States and around the were to the countries the artists For Art Histories of a Forever War, the exhibition by modern artists alongside the exhibition material and a a of the dynamics of the exhibition. Art Histories of a Forever War and Hsu also afforded the to archival research by Chen on the and an exhibition in The exhibition design objects and from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and that were by the American and produced out of a US aid to the development of craft and design that could be and in the US as a way to a US as part of a of modern art and other of US about technological and the space race, the within Art Histories of a Forever War were as part of a larger Cold War milieu military and cultural developments produced art In turn, the exhibition is a for a in to consider how these produced

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Decolonization · Economic history · Exhibition · Ideology · Interwar period · Modernity · Periodization · Political science · Politics · World War II · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture

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