主編語
Editor-in-chief’s Note

A Note from the Editor-in-chief

CHIANG Po-Shin

Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Institute of Art History and Art Criticism, Tainan National University of the Arts

Abstract

Toward the Future of the Archive: Revisiting the History and Movements of East Asian Contemporary Art

The No.34 and No.35 issues of the Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum are composed by the theses from the international symposium titled Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan (1960-1989). Collaborating with Taipei Fine Art Museum and Spring Foundation, I planned the conference, which took place on 8th and 9th April 2017, with the participation of scholars from various countries, such as Australia, Germany, America, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, France, the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan. Fifteen essays and eight case studies were presented at the venue, and it was an international symposium with relatively massive scale and academic depth in the Taiwanese art circle lately. The conference aimed to make a response to the recent trend to re-explore the history of contemporary art in various countries of East Asia after World War II.

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Archives of the Future —Remarks on the Concept of Tertiary Protention

Yuk Hui

Lecturer, ICAM/IPK, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

Abstract

This paper revisits the relation between protention and retension in the work of Husserl, Derrida to Stiegler, with special attention to Husserl’s later Bernau manuscripts, which shed new light on this question. Through this historical trajectory, this talk hopes to elaborate on what I developed in On the Existence of Digital Objects the concept of tertiary protention, by which we can understand as technologies of anticipation ranging from debt to prediction. It suggests that tertiary protention, which cannot be reduced to any form of retention, becomes the central question of the current stage of digital automation and constitutes a new regime of politics. In order to inquire into the new ecologies of mind, we will have to systematically examine and integrate the question of tertiary protention.

Keywords: tertiary protention, digital objects, phenomenology, archives, tertiary rention

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Other Worlds: The Native, the National, the Non-Objective

Patrick D. Flores

Professor, Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines

Abstract

The essay reflects on the work of the university art museum as it responds to the archival imperative. Such imperative prompts the museum, which is situated in the context of the university, to create conditions for its materials to interact discursively and aesthetically through research and exhibitions. More specifically, the essay looks into a possible trajectory of the Philippine modern through conceptual frameworks evoked by the categories “native,” “national,” and “non-objective.” The latter are referenced by three figures who were active in the first half of the twentieth century in the Philippines: the collector and bureaucrat Jorge Vargas, the sculptor Guillermo Tolentino, and the critic, curator, and poet Aurelio Alvero. With regard to Philippine modernity, it revisits the notion of the national in the context of a desire for distinction that is not necessarily governed by the tropes of western modernism and instead traces its arguments to a more cosmological and cosmopolitan source, thus the terms “native” and “non-objective” are foregrounded to complicate the “national.”

Keywords: archive, modernity, nation, non-objective painting, museum, collection

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A Nomad in Nowhereland：Hsieh Tehching’s One Year Performance (Outdoor Piece), 1981-1982

Hsieh Pei-chun

PhD student at SUNY-Binghamton, Art History Department

Abstract

This essay asserts that One Year Performance (Outdoor Piece, 1981-1982) conducted by Taiwanese-American artist, Hsieh Tehching, actively generates a critique towards the modern state and society.  As a space-oriented piece, it is set in dialogue with Hsieh’s pervious pieces while resonating with his martial law body memories in Taiwan and Fluxus art movement in New York City.  Recent art historians have rightly considered Hsieh’s works as a durational aesthetic, yet they also overlook the mobility and nomadism that Hsieh carries out in his search for art-fertilization under the restricted atmosphere in postwar Taiwan and his illegal alien status in U.S. In addition, art historians neglect the politic messages that are inherent within his travels from Taiwan to New York and from his self-isolated cage to an exploration of the metropolis.       

This essay aims to trace and specify Hsieh’s grand voyage, a migrant body as both an aesthetic and political site. Crystallized in the third piece of his One-Year Performance series, Outdoor Piece, this piece sets him in motion from sedentariness to itineracy and mobilizes his vulnerabilities. Through living a nomadic, outdoor life in New York City for a year, Hsieh’s reveals his body memories under the dictatorship in postwar Taiwan, reconciled with the state apparatus, and more importantly, reframes his performance to a critical site-specific art.  This one-year nomadic life leads Hsieh to a line of flight away from the modernized body desired by the state and the conundrum of his own art practice. In this light, Hsieh’s use of body in Outdoor Piece is reformed by postwar art, identity, and history of Taiwan. 

Keywords: Hsieh Tehching, Nomadism, Line of Flight, Deleuze and Guattari, performance art, Deterritorializatio

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On What does Lanling Theatre Workshop Experiment? The Openness and Politics of Body in the early 19

Wang Chun-yen

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University

Abstract

The article looks into the experiments that Lanling Theatre Workshop (hereafter LTW) conducted, by examining the politics of body in the play Hezhu’s New Match (Hezhu xinpei) directed by Jing Shi-chieh. It particularly pays attention to the historical and material condition in which LTW existed with regards to cultural materialism. It investigates cultural politics and discourses of LTW that may closely relate to American alternative theatre in the 1960s, the geopolitics of the Cold War as well as the dispositif and influence of area studies in the post-war era. The article aims to come to terms with the so-called “openness” of the body experiment emphasized and claimed by LTW as a re-articulation of the 1980s Taiwan theatre in the post-war world.

Keywords: Lanling Theatre Workshop, Hezhu’s New Match (Hezhu xinpei), Taiwan Theatre, Cold War

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