Taipei – There is another capital beneath the waves The exhibition at the Fengjia Museum guides visitors through three exhibition halls. The exhibition is a collaboration between artists Xu Jiawei, Zhang Tingtong and Zheng Xianyu, and includes two films that reveal the entanglement between the Taiwanese and Japanese sugar industries, namely “Crystal Seedlings” and the work of the same name. The film installation reflects on the conflict between commercial, colonial and manipulative forces that drive the course of history, opening one scene and unveiling the next, just like the passage of time.
The exhibition begins in a building from the Japanese colonial period. Its facade is painted on screens supported on the floor of the museum’s first exhibition hall and on panels suspended from the ceiling. From the entrance, it looks majestic and solid. Arriving at the back of the room, however, it appears fragmented, like a stopped explosion. The works in the exhibition are scattered with such stages, where the floor beneath one history collapses into the next.
“Crystal Seedlings” is set in the town of Huwei, the center of Japan’s colonial sugar empire that was nearly destroyed by U.S. troops during World War II. Performers use drumsticks and bows to make music from equipment at the historic Huwei Sugar Factory. The harsh hum of rusting machinery provides the backdrop for the spectacle of Taiwanese glove puppetry, which takes place in the fields of Yulin County where sugar cane still grows. The story is a retelling of “Kurama Tengu,” a staple from the era when the government forced the Japanization of Taiwanese art. In this version, rogue samurai save the town’s workers from the machinations of corrupt officials. While some of the puppets wield Samurai swordOthers tracked the shots with cameras and boom mics.
Puppets are the protagonists of both films. The multi-channel finale, “A City Beneath the Waves,” opens with a Bunraku puppet, draped in white veil, parading through the factory of the Kanmon Sugar Company in Moji Ward, another historical node in Japan’s sugar network. Digital motion sensors are strapped to the puppet’s wooden limbs, and a puppet-like figure in traditional clothing on a nearby screen moves accordingly. The puppet becomes a noblewoman in a bright red kimono, perhaps a new Ama from the 14th-century Japanese legend “The Tale of the Heike,” which tells the story of the battle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for rule of Japan. In fact, the film’s title comes from the words the character whispers to her newborn grandson when she sees history betraying them, choosing drowning over a fate of failure. But who is pulling her strings as she leaps into the sea with the infant emperor in her arms? Golden horns sprout from the digital puppet’s head, like antennae, and the historical figure is corrupted, her history reinterpreted. Human dancers wearing VR headsets seize control of the puppet, which glides beneath the waves of the digital ocean. The work asks, is history itself a virtual reality, another stage that can be freely manipulated?
Wearing VR headsets, dancers twirl puppets in the wreckage of a luxury ocean liner that hovered in the waters between Japan and Taiwan at the height of the empire. This manipulation of puppet strings resonates throughout the exhibition, pointing to the manipulations and conspiracies that drive history forward. Yet the exhibition is not a revision of colonial history, but a rethinking of history itself, and the possibility of adjusting the strings that drive history forward.
There is another capital beneath the waves The exhibition will be on display at Fengjia Museum (No. 166, Daye Road, Beitou District, Taipei City, Taiwan) until June 30. The exhibition is jointly organized by Zhou Cultural Foundation, Fengjia Museum and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Laboratory (C-LAB).
