Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Reconstruction of historical narratives is mostly done by supplementing or rewriting imaginations of present mainstream historical perspectives with newly unearthed archives to achieve the reconstruction of discourses. This is also the core concept employed by artist CHEN Fei-hao in his exploration of Taiwanese texts and narratives from the period of Japanese rule. In Murder-Suicide in the South of Empire: CHEN Fei-hao Solo Exhibition , the artist utilizes various textual forms from performing arts, play scripts, literature and news, combined with real landscapes of Keelung, Kaohsiung, and Penghu, to formulate his imagination of Taiwan under Japanese rule, which is reconstructed through his personal ideas.

“The South of Empire” refers to Taiwan colonized by Japan, whereas the “murder-suicide”(無理心中) is derived from a Japanese expression which means a murder-suicide, namely someone commits a crime of passion and subsequently takes his or her own life, whether or not he or she has intension of dying. The title signals how the exhibition utilizes stories or events of murder-suicides from the period of Japanese rule as a lead-in to explore and reconstruct historical narratives of the time. In the exhibition, artworks featuring the topic of murder-suicide draw inspiration widely from the historical context of the period of Japanese rule. For instance, Hae-eo-hwa Shinjū: Korean Kisaeng’s Love Suicide at Keelung Harbor is integrated with the artist’s novel that recounts anecdotes encountered by Koreans in Japanese-ruled Taiwan. The artist adapts the literary form of novel, which embodies modernity in a way, into a traditional Taiwanese narrative song (liamkua) informed by a sense of pre-modern imagination, to express its historical meaning through such a conversion.

Othello , on the other hand, draws inspiration from the work of Japanese theater artist Kawakami Otojiro from the early period of Japanese rule, who converted Taiwan’s Penghu, a new colony of the Empire of Japan at the time, into the backdrop of his production of Shakespeare’s Othello . Kawakami adapted the original story, in which the Moorish general Othello murdered his wife out of jealousy, into the shocking murder of the Taiwan Governor-General’s wife by her own husband, Muro Washiro. The artist invites contemporary theater workers in Taiwan and organizes a play reading to reflect on the work’s historical meaning through the sharing of and discussion about the play reading experience.

The final piece in the exhibition, The Night Mist at the Harbor , brings together previously irrelevant propagandist image archives from the period of Japanese rule and the post-war Republic of China era. Using Taiwanese and Japanese popular songs as well as news reports about homosexual crimes of passion in Kaohsiung, the work reconstructs the texts into a fresh narrative about a same-sex crime of passion. As the work revisits the scenes of the crimes passionnel taking place in Kaohsiung during two different periods, it also uses the narrative of violent romance as a metaphor for the nervous yet codependent relationship between political regimes and the people from the period of Japanese rule to the post-war era.

This exhibition comprehensively demonstrates how the artist uses Taiwan’s exotic legacies and intercultural narratives from the period of Japanese rule as his lead-in to combine historical narratives and their variations based on real places and scenes, such as Keelung, Kaohsiung, and Penghu, to use the real landscapes mentioned in these narrative as a catalyst for fresh cultural imagination of cities in the imperial south, which also serves as a metaphor for the past, present, and even the future history and cultural imagination of Taiwan.