Chao-yi Tsai

In Search of a Home for Photography: Introduction to the National Center of Photography and Images

Wei-I Lee

Thinking Photography in Taiwan: An Alternative Possibility

Liang-Pin Tsao

Towards an Open Photography Culture: the Mission and Purpose of Lightbox Photo Library

Paul Barclay

Disarming the “Savage”: Headhunters and Combatants in Japanese Colonial Photography of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples

In  June 1913, the Japanese Minister of the Interior issued a stern warning to publishers. Thenceforth, “postcards of ‘headhunting savages’ or of a similar type, such as those showing skull-shelves,” were banned from mail delivery to the Home Islands (naichi). This announcement marked a watershed in colonial Taiwan’s visual history. From 1895 into the 1910s, photographs and postcards of gun-toting Indigenous men, and the skull-shelves they decorated with severed heads, were dominant symbols of Taiwan in the Japanese mediascape. But as ritually sanctioned headhunting was suppressed, and skull-shelves destroyed in the 1910s, images of spear- and dagger-wielding “former headhunters” replaced photographs of active headhunters in Japanese iconography.

Nonetheless, Japanese police forces and the Imperial Japanese Army were still quick to arm Indigenous men with guns in the 1920s through the 1940s, to kill other Taiwan Indigenous peoples in counter-insurgency campaigns or Japan’s enemies in the Pacific War. Today’s memorial sites of the 1874 Stone Gate Battle and the 1930 Musha Rebellion continue the tradition of depicting Indigenous combatants as culture-bearers, rather than as soldiers, by featuring statues of anti-Japanese warriors Alok and Mona Rudao with spears and daggers, instead of with the firearms they used to fight off invaders. This essay tracks the appearance and removal of firearms in photographs of Indigenous people during the Japanese colonial period to explore the creation of so-called “martial castes” and “bellicose tribes” in colonial Taiwan, and their deployment as “ethnic soldiers” in the wars of Imperial Japan.

Mia Yinxing Liu

The Surrealist and the Documentary: Chang Chao-tang’s Photography

This paper examines Chang Chao-tang’s photography in its social and cultural contexts and reads his photographic images with a special focus on the temporal–spatial syntax at work: “superimpositions” between “the sculptural” and/over the natural, the still life and/over the transient, and so on. Through this two-pronged analysis of both the social–historical and the formal, the article addresses questions regarding how Chang’s photographs manage to be both “Surrealist” and “real,” and how exactly Surrealist imagery and the social documentary work together in his art.

Joseph Allen

The Classroom Gaze: Graduation Class Photos from Colonial Taiwan

This essay explores the conditions and contexts of the group portraits of students in public schools in Taiwan, primarily during the Japanese period, as seen in graduation yearbooks (biye jinian ce 畢業紀念冊). The photographs are investigated as an extreme form of vernacular photography, that is “nearly meaningless.” Following the recent study of such photographs in the European and American context by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer (School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, 2020), the Taiwan materials are scrutinized for the social and ideological considerations they embody, including punctum that breakthrough the institutional rigidity of the genre.

Ellen Y. Chang

The Untimely (Moving) Images and Their Impossible Desires: the Historical and the Imaginary in Su Hui-Yu’s Re-shoots

Shuxia Chen

Picturing a Psychic World of 1980s Taiwan

The 1970s and 1980s in Taiwan saw peak industrial growth, amid a shift toward a nativist turn in in local histories and cultures.  Debates regarding Taiwanese identity at the time might also be reflected the increased interest in mental health and psychiatry among educated public. The issue of mental health had attracted public attention following reports on the conditions and practices at Long Fa Tang, a Buddhist temple for people living with mental illness.  While institutions such as Long Fa Tang were at the centre of public debates, the periodical Teacher Chang, the first Taiwanese popular psychology magazine was established in 1982, to raise public knowledge on mental health through long-term investigation, including the novel use of regular photo essays.

Jeehey Kim

Visualizing Taiwan in Korea and Japan since 1945

This paper explores the ways in which Taiwan has been visualized through photography in South Korea and Japan since 1945. As the Chinese diasporic community chose to gain citizenship of the Republic of China, followed by the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the Taiwanese community of South Korea became the dominant diasporic community in South Korea. The expulsion of Taiwan from the United Nations in 1971 led to a shift in photographic exchanges between the two countries as the South Korean government established diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China.

The student protests of the late 1960s came to be overshadowed by the reversion of Okinawa in 1972. Nostalgic cultural essentialism gained momentum with the Japanese photographers paying attention to what was considered the lost essence of Japan and its people. This paper explores the works of Japanese and Korean photographers, including Tōmatsu Shōmei, Moriyama Daido, and Myung Duk Joo, to shed light on how Taiwan and its diasporic community was visualized in the two countries since the late 1960s.

Olivier Krischer

Curatorial notes on Tsai Hui-feng and the ‘documentary’ image in 1960s Taiwan

The significant amount of work on Taiwan photographic history in recent years is partly distinguished by its self-reflexive discourse which often interrogates its own process of formation. In this spirit, my paper takes the form of a critical reflection on curating the exhibition Between: Picturing 1950-60s Taiwan from the collection of the National Museum of History Taipei, held in Canberra in 2015. The first part of the paper surveys exhibition, its parameters, and the way photography was positioned among a selection of contemporaneous media including woodblock prints, sketches and watercolours, suggesting shared sensibilities and even motifs that complicate the issue of genre, style or media history.

The second part of the talk focuses on the work of one of the exhibited photographers, Tsai Hui-feng (1928-2005). Tsai is somewhat typical of a generation of lifelong amateurs who only belatedly gain recognition. Yet, in addition to this, I am interested in the ways that reading Tsai’s work curatorially, in space, may recuperate a clear visual politics animating the camera, contact sheet and the photographic experience, yet obscured in the era of individual prints.

Chia-Chi Chen

From Scenery to Landscape: National Imagination and Social Consciousness in Taiwanese Landscape Photography

從美景到地景：台灣地景攝影中的國族想像與社會意識

This paper attempts to explore how Taiwanese landscape photography tradition has transitioned from picturesque scenery photography to critically conscious landscape photography. Firstly, several aspects of the landscape presentation of postwar Taiwanese photography will be summarized: (1) Chinese imagination and local sight presented in the scenery photography in the 1950s and 1960s (2) discovery and representation of Taiwan in the 1970s under the prevalence of documentary photography (3) critical landscape photography after 2000.

From the above, we can recognize that Taiwanese landscape photography has its own particularity, it reflects the reality and the identity closely related to Taiwanese society and politics. Secondly, several contemporary landscape photography works will be paid attention to, and to see how they focus on Taiwanese geography, wounded land and today’s national imagination.