Staging Art and Chineseness by Jane Chin Davidson;

Author:Jane Chin Davidson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

3.2 Wu Mali, Epitaph, 1997, video installation.

The culmination of this experience was expressed in her video installation presented in the groundbreaking 1998 Inside Out: New Chinese Art exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. Epitaph (see figure 3.2) is a symbolic and meditative work commemorating the massacre of thousands of Taiwanese citizens who were killed by Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist troops on 28 February 1947.62 (The Kuomintang had been given control of Taiwan following the surrender of Japan in 1945.) In the White Terror aftermath, the Taiwanese endured forty years of martial law in which tens of thousands of people were executed between 1949 and 1992 for suspected anti-government activities.63 Wu asserts that while male victims of the tragedy have been acknowledged, rehabilitated, and commemorated as martyrs, the accounts of female victims continue to be neglected, which Epitaph sought to address. The video screen in the center of the installation projected the scene of the ocean and pounding waves, while placed adjacent on the two sides of the video screen are large glass panels etched with excerpted text from Juan Mei-shu’s 1992 book Sound of Weeping in a Dim Corner, a remembrance of the victims of the 28 February White Terror.64 Art historian Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen describes the visual encounter: ‘text is presented in an abstract manner to create an imaginary historical distance, and the painful experiences of the women victims and survivors are heard, experienced’ but the expression was never a ‘reenactment of violence.’65 Epitaph was a gender-specific engagement, and during the 1990s, Wu’s feminist challenge to the male-dominated sphere of both art and politics in Taiwan was through creating sights and spaces specifically for women.

Wu’s cinematic ‘enclosures’ contributed to a particular feminist model in the 1980s and 1990s for the theory and practice of film installation. She shares ideals that are mutual with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s conception of a film form that could provide an alternative to perpetuating the ‘master-centered text’ whereby film offers another kind of historicizing text – Trinh explains that by ‘putting representation under scrutiny, textual theory/practice has more likely helped to upset rooted ideologies by bringing the mechanics of their inner workings to the fore.’66 The patriarchal text has long been under the scrutiny of Wu’s critical analysis, and in works such as Library, discussed in Chapter Five, the annihilation of books such as Confucius’s Five Classics was literally and visually orchestrated to show the destruction of the patriarchal canon as Wu shredded the actual books and put them in individual cases that emulated books. The use of both text and film in Epitaph in the invented space of the installation allows for the creation of what Chen describes as ‘feminine subjectivity that can interchangeably take either men or women as its primary self.’67 The installation form could foster this kind of experience for the viewer.

The same use of the video installation method was exemplified in the Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang (1997) (see plate 15). For this project, Wu was not simply narrating the stories

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