Performance artist River Lin dives into the dynamic history of the island's queer and Indigenous art scene

Keep queer and carry on: the art of becoming in Taiwan

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In 1986, the activist Chi Chia-Wei effectively started the LGBTQ movement in Taiwan: he staged a press conference during which he publicly came out and called for equal rights for all people, including homosexuals. A year later, martial law was lifted in the country, 38 years after it had been imposed by the regime of the Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-Shek. The freedom of speech and democracy that followed allowed Taiwan’s contemporary art scene and culture to blossom.During the 1990s, artists and activists from the fields of literature, art, theater, and film increasingly began to deal with the legacies of authoritarianism by queering heteronormative tendencies. The theater director Tien Chi-Yuan poached the Chinese folk tale Legend of the White Snake and staged White Water (1993) to subvert cultural hegemony and uncover homosexual corporality. Noise-art pioneer Lin Chi-Wei organized anarchic assemblies, including the Taipei Post-Industrial Arts Festival in 1995. Meanwhile, the work of contemporary artist Hou Chun-Ming initially questioned sexuality, with it later tuning into the notion of Asian fatherhood through painting. Pivotal figures like these paved the way for post-martial-law queer culture in Taiwan. Now, more than 25 years after the term ‘queer’ was first translated into Chinese Mandarin and introduced by the left-leaning cultural magazine The Edge of the Island, Taiwanese contemporary artists with queer-centric practices have been embraced by the country’s institutions and the market.&nbsp;

In 2017, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei held Asia’s first major LGBTQ art exhibition, ‘Spectrosynthesis’; presented by the Sunpride Foundation and curated by Sean C.S.Hu, it outlined a brief trajectory of Asian queer art. Then, in 2019, the year Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, the pioneering cyber-feminist artist Shu Lea Cheang represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale, inviting audiences to rethink the asymmetries of power, censorship, and networked violence in the context of everyday life, surveillance, and hybrid sexualities.Taipei’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1352/Chi-Wen-Gallery">Chi-Wen Gallery</a> constantly supports and presents young artists at international art fairs, including&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9122/Cheng-Ta-Yu">Yu Cheng-Ta</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/44205/Su-Misu">Su Misu</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/47051/Victoria-Sin">Victoria Sin</a>, who intensively interrogate the rigid, societal mechanisms of identification through drag and hybrid performativity. Meanwhile,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1453/TKG">TKG+</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1388/Tina-Keng-Gallery">Tina Keng Gallery</a>’s contemporary platform, stages exhibitions by artists who challenge conventional forms and frameworks, such as Niu Jun-Qiang, whose situated video installations examine the stigmatization of homosexuality.

Clearly, in recent years, art institutions in Taiwan have been ‘queered’ by young artists ready to negotiate the protocols of curatorship and display by constructing situations, choreographing objects, and engaging with communities. In 2019, Yu curated ‘Liqueered’ at Taipei’s Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts as part of the ‘Boochoa’ exhibition, staging live actions by LGBTQ artists of his generation. Through a series of workshops, audiences were invited to collaborate with the artists to ‘rehearse’ notions of work-in-progress and live performance. These included an electronic dance music party engineered by the sound artist Betty Apple, who used a performance that computerized the musicality of sexual voices performed in a live-streamed ASMR setting as the soundtrack, while the video artist Tzuan Wu’s expanded cinema utilized 16mm film to transform the exhibition space into a theatrical silver screen.Born in 1983 and coming of age amid the rise of internet culture, digital technology, and social media, Yu created his alter ego FAMEME for Performa in 2019: a fictional influencer from Asia with an American dream to promote the ‘king of fruit,’ the durian, in New York City. As part of this project, Yu opened the Museum of Durian, released a theme song, and broadcast a commercial to promote his brand in Times Square, where he also shot a live music video.

The same year, young Indigenous Amis artist Fangas Nayaw also took his work to the international arena, staging Masingkiay, which translates as ‘go crazy’, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. First presented in 2017 at MoNTUE, the contemporary art museum of the National Taipei University of Education, the project conflated forms of installation, performance and workshop to ‘queer’ the museum into a gathering space, with visitors encountering Indigenous dancers and performers in a social setting where traditional dance, drinks, and conversations were served. During its Taiwan iteration, performers posed questions to audience members such as, ‘Do you think Indigenous peoples are alcoholics?’ and, ‘Have you met any Indigenous people in your neighborhoods or workplaces?’ As conversations evolved, artists invited participants to dance and sing while negotiating the stereotyping of Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, which are made up by 16 tribes, and the oppression of their histories and cultures. Formosan people have experienced a long history of colonization by, among others, the Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese Han since the 17th century. Regimes may have changed, but Taiwan has never abandoned its struggle to become a sovereign nation.With that in mind, Masingkiay enacted social correction in a country with an Indigenous population who, as recently as two decades ago, preferred to remain ‘in the closet’ to avoid discrimination. Fangas questioned the museum’s social function by blurring the boundaries between center and periphery, human and cultural space, and proposing how participation and community engagement could facilitate research into and implementation of decolonization.

Fangas and Yu are emblematic of the younger generations of Indigenous and LGBTQ artists in Taiwan who are currently queering formalized cultural representation, not to mention the formal entity of the nation-state itself, by confronting cultural binary systems. Their work seeks to break anthropological, nationalist, and touristic gazes, and advocates for progressive narratives for heterogeneous times. The Atayal-Taiwanese visual artist Anchi Lin often works with everyday objects found in tribal culture to create videos, sculptures, and installations in which her body collects and curates alternate identities. For her video To the shore/Canoe (2016–17), Lin invited a group of Indigenous women of different ages to simulate ocean sounds by sweeping a broom across a floor, gesturing to the framing of tribeswomen as domestic laborers unable to sail. The Truku choreographer Watan Tusi learned the art of fabric weaving, normally restricted to female-only production in many tribes, in order to translate the craft into a choreographic language. Inspired by Truku dance movements driven by the lower body, he also invents and draws ‘pace notations’ that document scores of the Trukus’ ritual singing and dancing and develop expanded variations of contemporary choreography.&nbsp;In other acts of transmission, the Truku artist Dondon Hounwn has turned to education and cultural communication as a way of strengthening the unity between tribal communities, cultivating young artists, and disambiguating people’s readings of Indigenous culture. Meanwhile, the drag queens Feilibing Ice Queen and Rose Mary perform traditional folk music out of context, juxtaposing the codes, signs, and symbols of their tribal roots, which are Bunun and Atayal respectively, with Western costume and makeup. Although they are seen as controversial acts by an older generation, they have inspired younger Indigenous people to enter the drag community.&nbsp;

From gender studies to ecological infrastructure, the ‘outing’ of artists in the expanded context of queer art in Taiwan today goes beyond identity. It includes sophisticated and radical propositions that challenge the confines of decorum and the status quo, destabilizing any notions of framing.Take Jun Yang’s project ‘Jun Yang– The Artist, His Collaborators, Their Exhibition, and Three Venues’, the retrospective of his work presented by TKG+, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, from December 2020 until the end of January 2021. As the title suggests, the artist – one of the co-founders of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center – chose to decentralize notions of framing by staging the show in three different places and including works by other artists. That tendency to question, protest, challenge, and negotiate is where the histories of queer and Indigenous artistic practice and activism converge in Taiwan in the 21st century, with the politics of decentralization and decolonization all the while evolving on the island. Thanks to the residual political complexities from the previous century, China’s claims on the island, and Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO during Covid-19, this is a contemporary democracy born out of histories of imperialism, colonial occupation, and civil war that is effectively in a constant state of becoming.As ongoing negotiations of identity politics, human rights, and land ownership continue, new generations across the fields of art and culture are demonstrating more and more that this small island’s historical perspective is plural. Today, we are increasingly learning – indeed, queering – from that plurality.

River Lin is a performance artist based in Paris and Taipei whose work has been presented by institutions including M+ museum, Hong Kong; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and KANAL Centre Pompidou,Brussels. In 2017, he initiated Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM) with Taipei Performing Arts Center, for which he curates annual gatherings designed to generate cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges between artists in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.Top image: installation view of&nbsp;Jun-Jieh Wang's work Passion (2017), at MOCA Taipei, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and MOCA Taipei.

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Keep queer and carry on: the art of becoming in Taiwan

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