Making Friends/ Fire, 2020

The districts of Shilin and Beitou, right next to today’s Taipei Fine Arts Museum, used to be the military and administration center of the KMT regime. This historical context can be traced further back to the Japanese colonial era. Both governments deployed symbolic, political, and military infrastructures to define the two areas and place local citizens under surveillance between 1920 and 1990.

This work revolves around the theme “Cold War experience in Shilin and Beitou.” It comprises of three parts arranged in a pentagon to symbolize the five petals of the “plum blossom,” which the KMT regime adopted as a spiritual symbol in the governance of Cold-War Taiwan. The first part is a stele called “The Cold Plum Fort—A Cold War Monument in Taiwan.” The second includes a set of rearranged files, documents, and objects pertaining to the KMT regime, which completes the first part in terms of how the KMT regime carried out spiritual and bodily surveillance to maintain the integrity of the “plum blossom.” The third part, under the name “Making Friends/ Fire,” is an installation of five videos surrounding the previous two parts, which offers a people’s narrative in contrast to and in dialogue with the state narrative. Altogether, the three parts embody not only the thermal contrast between warmness and coldness, but also how Taiwanese people make a fire in the Cold War by making friends.