Before martial law was lifted in 1987, an atmosphere of political relaxation started forming in society, yet this energy was accompanied by certain dangers. This was manifest in incidents such as the Lin family massacre, Lee Shih-ke’s armed robbery of the Taiwan Land Bank, Premier Yu Kuo-hwa’s course of “internationalization, liberalization, and institutionalization,” the murder of Henry Liu, the 10^th Credit Cooperative Bank scandal, the execution of Tang Ying-shen, the establishment of the Democratic Progressive Party, and others. Politics in the 1980s came to a boil due to opposition between government systems and individual freedoms—a tension triggered by information from emerging media outlets that challenged taboos and official histories spun by the authorities. This tension was manifest in social movements exposing public dissent; ambiguity in the face of historical events such as the lifting of martial law, the Tiananmen Square protests, and the rise of new China; gender rebellion, including the promotion of feminism and sexual minorities in writing and behavior; and the establishment of recording studios and rock music by artists such as Lo Ta-yu. At this time, history became a domain where sharing and dialogue were possible, and the widespread use of media technology among individuals working in different fields meant that collaboration started to appear in the recording of events and creation of documentary projects, leading to tension between coercive politics and personal biopolitics. This appeared in many realms where inner forces struggled against prevailing systems, such as in gender versus politics, music versus society, memory (or recording) versus history, actions versus political space, and theater versus political narrative. In many texts, desire and repression were interactively mapped, thus providing the spirit of this theme: entanglement.

During the 80s, a period in Taiwan still lacking a concept of copyright law, a great quantity of foreign books were translated and, along with Western movies, music, and progressive ideologies, circulated on the island. It was through scholars returning from abroad that internationalization, Western training methods, and bourgeois tastes arrived in Taiwan, and under the pursuit of a liberalized political atmosphere, the arrival of postmodern trends, and improving socioeconomic conditions, that Taiwan saw flourishing development in translation in the 1980s. Both Eileen Chang’s novels, which were introduced to Taiwan by the Crown Publishing Company and explored the plight of women in different historical contexts, and Sanmo’s writings and translations, which gave rise to a spirit of adventure and exoticism in the 1970s, focused the desire of the younger generation on distant worlds in the 1980s. Also, performances by the Hong Kong-based international experimental theater company Zuni Icosahedron and Japan’s experimental Butoh dance troupe Byakko Sha had a profound influence during this time. Foreign cultural forms, such as rock music, Hong Kong soap operas, and international films introduced by the Golden Horse Film Festival, activated thinking and creativity while intensifying the desire for exploration and expression. The art of translation not only stimulated a thirst for knowledge and became a way for Taiwan to recognize relationships between the local and international, but also generated multiple disruptions and spawned all kinds of hybridity. Experimentation, actions, and artworks born of this interpretive exchange were an expression of Taiwan’s unique era of translation and also formed the fluid basis of Taiwan’s localization: hybridity.

New local and international political situations brought by the end of martial law and break in Taiwanese-American diplomatic relations caused a need for renewed thinking about politics, history, and identity. This new awareness was especially important with regard to Chinese culture and globalization, and as local consciousness and understanding of international relations changed, layers of colonial history and geopolitics became a part of bodily, urban, cultural, and industrial development. Taiwanese photographers began taking a more nuanced look at Taiwan and closely followed events in society, art exhibitions, and the performing arts. An increase in reportage began to play a greater role in shaping Taiwan, exemplified by Chang Chao-Tang’s pioneering documentary television series Fragrant Formosa and The Journey of Images, which coincided with NHK’s documentary television series The Silk Road and its expansive scenery of China, and photojournalist Lang Jingshan’s photomontages with their romanticizing aesthetic of Chinese landscape painting. Left with an impossible to predict fate, Taiwanese individuals developed a double consciousness as they violently swung between imagining China and acknowledging Taiwan in their search for their own identities. Actually, the 1970s works of the painter Hung Tung and sculptor Ju Ming had already embodied this polarity of identity that Taiwanese people were bound to later face. In the performing arts under the banner of postmodernism, hybridity in the form of localized and sinicized Western avant-gardism began to arise, thus satisfying newly popular bourgeois tastes and perfectly portraying the psychological complex people were facing at the time: oscillation. 

Looking back on the 1980s in Taiwan, everything—people, events, objects, places—influenced everything else in big and small ways. As it accumulated and circulated, information served as society’s new all-encompassing transformational energy. Physical space, the media, and other platforms became congregation sites where events percolated or even unfolded. A flood of information concentrated kinetic energy to generate networks of flowing people, images, narratives, news, and capital. In this era without computers or Internet, supplements in the island’s newspapers not only published literary works, but also were responsible for presenting the ruminations of international intellectuals, which exerted cultural influence in Taiwan. The programs with in-depth topics, newly established arts and cultural awards, and experimental graphic design of the time were all embryonic versions of those that would mature in Internet society to come. Furthermore, magazines published by the Tangwai (outside the party), as well as those focusing on literature, the visual arts, and film, and even celebrity gossip magazines were established, providing valuable if not boisterous platforms for exchange. This access led artists working in various fields to common spaces for lively gatherings, which turned out to be historically significant chora where people and events collided in the energetic transdisciplinary practice representative of 1980s Taiwan. These events drew individuals together and encouraged them to consider and elevate various self-enlightenment techniques in which they continuously connected, deconstructed, and expanded ideas—and even though they were unaware of it at the time, to make history by facilitating transformative progress with the spirit of their meetings and collaborations: convergence.