Kinmen (also known as Quemoy) is a small island a few kilometres off the southern Chinese mainland. For forty years it had a strategic position: at first in the civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, and later in the cold war between China and Taiwan. After China's Nationalists cleared off to Taiwan in 1949 under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, taking up the fight against the People's Republic of China as the new Republic of China, Kinmen served Taiwan as a defence post. Matters finally came to a head in August 1958, when the island became the target of a 44-day artillery barrage.

The »Bunker Museum«, which is also the name of the exhibition there, aims to commemorate this period with 18 projects by artists from both China and Taiwan and to transform former relics of the island's defences into museum-like spaces. In accordance with the slogan »Everything is Museum«, the concept upon which curator Cai Guo-Qiang has based the entire project, a kind of risk-free platform is to be created under the label of »institution« to bring together art and local history. This turns the sites, striking in themselves, into clearly »marked« exhibition locations. This leads one to suspect that the curator is more interested in finding a strategic link to the principle of the biennial with its global attention economy than in subjecting local specificities to closer examination. The local department of education, however, expresses the aim of such a project in much more down-to-earth terms. Cultural practice is seen as part of a necessary and complex development concept for the island; it is only in the last ten years that developments towards a civil society have taken place there. In addition, several hundred of the over two thousand bunkers have to be pulled down. It thus seems like a good idea to put some of them to cultural use.

The Beijing-based architect Chang Yung Ho examined the question of use or of function and functionlessness by dividing one of the bunkers listed for demolition into two halves. In this way, he gave it a new function in the sense of exposing the construction. Many of the bunker projects, however, do no more than superficially manoeuvre between aestheticization and symbolic re-evaluation, which often makes the local specifities seem interchangeable. Ying Ling, who enjoys pop-star status in Asia as an erotic idol and political activist, at least tries to shift the viewpoint in slightly more provocative fashion. »Lovemaking for World Peace« is an installation preceded by a performance in which she forces the totalitarian leaders of both sides, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, to be present as she performs the sexual act with the skeleton of her soldier lover.

The symbolic engagement with historical facts is more trenchant where it draws on personal experiences, as is the case with the Kinmen-born artist Lee Shi-Chi. Lee, who personally experienced the takeover of Taiwan and thus also Kinmen, as well as the escalation of the conflict, describes the period of the cold war as being a permanent lottery-like situation for the Kinmenese. He invites viewers to gamble on a lottery machine. The numbers drawn can be compared on a chronological table. If the numbers, which characterize survival and memory, agree, they have won. Lee's second installation in front of the bunker sums up the island's main traits, not entirely without irony: a baldachin made of bomb-shaped liqueur bottles is a reference not only to the blitzkrieg, but also illustrates the island's transition from a military orientation to an economic one, which mainly consists of liqueur production and the processing of bomb fragments.
This survey just about covers what the local administration is intending to achieve with the Bunker Museum. Besides the politics of commemoration, which are seen as an important aspect, the intended cultural development is meant in the long term to set in motion an economic upturn. After the abrupt change brought about by the island's de-militarization, this latter will need some new concepts: up into the nineties, the island lived from the service sector for the army; this sector collapsed for the most part when ninety percent of the military personnel – there was a reduction from one hundred thousand soldiers to ten thousand – were withdrawn. Sixty percent of the population of Kinmen have left the island, and the remaining forty percent are now making a joint effort to react to the changed conditions by taking an unusually positive view of the situation.

With his project, the New York-based filmmaker Wu Tung Wang also calls for a transferral of historical conditions into the present. In the documentary »Surrender«, Wu gets children from Kinmen to examine their own attitude to violence, the interpretation of fairness and the definition of cultural and political identity. The clarification of these fragile identity-forming components is indeed very important, especially as most Kinmenese have stronger personal and historical links to the nearby mainland than to Taiwan, which is 250 kilometres away. Even though the island inhabitants now have a special status and do not, like other Taiwanese, have to travel via Hong Kong to go to China.

This geo-historically torn situation is treated in two other projects that portray Kinmen as a strategic buffer zone not only in a military sense, but also ideologically. The island's geographical position near the Chinese mainland enormously simplified the dissemination of propaganda, as announcements could be made over the sea using only moderately powerful loudspeakers and huge megaphones. The artist Shen Yuan refers to this seemingly bizarre form of ideological attack by attaching an oversized megaphone to a bunker and setting up a tea house inside on a tongue-shaped floor construction. The Taiwanese artist group Da Lun Wei Art Squad uses documentary methods to examine the mechanisms of ideological warfare. A bunker-filling archive brings together documents outlining the success stories, propagated by both sides, that portrayed defectors as popular heroes. It is no coincidence that this chronological survey ends in the eighties, when this method of boosting the system began to crumble – for example, one defector who made the headlines as a murderer cast doubt on this kind of heroism. At this time, the process of democratization began in Taiwan and China simultaneously started its policy of openness.

Kinmen's present political objectives are altogether much clearer than the Bunker Museum shows. This was recently emphasized: when, shortly after her appointment, the new US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, stressed the position of the USA as the custodian of order in the triangle of China-Taiwan-USA, thus encouraging the Taiwanese government to plead for the independence it wants, Kinmen announced that, in the case of a Taiwanese war of independence, it would try to gain independence from Taiwan. By so doing, Kinmen has taken up a stance opposed to hardliner solutions from any side. While there is no need to emphasize that the withdrawal of troops had less to do with smoother diplomatic relations than with the newly developed precision missiles that are now aimed directly at Taiwan, in Kinmen people are trying to put the island back on its economic feet and overcome its political status as a buffer zone.

Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art Kinmen, Taiwan
11 September 2004 to 10 January 2005

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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