Located on Green Island is a prison from the White Terror period. In the past, discussions focused on exploring and retracing the history of the political prisoners on the island, oblivious to the ways intense weather and environmental conditions might affect how history is perceived. As Green Island became a symbol of historical violence, it seemingly echoes what Erwin STRAUSS in The Sense of the Senses (Du sens des sens, 2000) wrote: “the depressed is stripped of a connection with the landscape, no longer able to perceive the surroundings”. However, Green Island’s natural environment is never something that can be ignored, as told in the chorographies or spoken accounts of the residents raised here– the inclement sea winds, sun, and summer heat have always been a major challenge for life on the island. Thus, the question I would like to raise is: how does one commemorate on such an island?
When I arrived on Green Island this year (2023), it was at the tail end of the human rights art festival. I postponed the trip several times due to typhoons in early fall. A day before setting out, I got word of electrical outages caused by the typhoon, forcing a temporary closure of the exhibition spaces. So anxiously I took the train to Taitung, boarded a passenger ship to Green Island, and came face to face with the tormenting heat. For the next few days, I explored the memorial grounds on foot under the blazing sun and sea winds, between the stifling exhibition spaces that as always test my will to observe and think.
It’s like this every time I visit; each time I arrive on Green Island, my rational senses are overwhelmed by its natural environment. In fact, on the way to Green Island, my thoughts were caught up in the difficult question of monuments, thinking about how the slogans in red lettering, left behind by the old prison on Green Island of the party-state period, and the statues and relics still present in so many places, speak of the history of the island and perpetuate political desires across the strait, or indeed the entire Pacific. It’s not about unification or independence rather than it is about the left or right. Green Island is repeatedly caught up in all manners of discourse, like a tiny fissure in the Pacific. Perhaps for all those who came to Green Island to this prison, the history it bears is in fact a wound that cuts in to the island’s ethnic and political conflicts. For the victims and their families emotionally attached to the painful past, the question of how “to engage in conversation” proves even more difficult.
The moment we landed on the island, this predicament was cut short by the intense climate of Green Island. I am reminded of Anna Lowenhaupt TSING’s sobering words in “Proliférations” (2022): unlike the Anthropocene which engrosses the public imagination in recent years, “the Holocene has always been (Holoscène est toujours là.)” In certain environmental conditions, the non-human world can simply put a stop to all human-centered narratives, casting aside all attempts to preserve history.
That’s just how the extreme weather conditions of Green Island have ruthlessly ended my conflicting thoughts on history and politics. On Green Island, whether a site of injustice is torn down or not might not be a question of ideology or political identity, but rather how any intent of commemoration or preservation can be defeated at any instant by the sheer acts of the environment. When I saw Leeroy NEW‘s weather-beaten bamboo-weave sea vessels in the New Life Correction Center exhibition area, as well as the installations of LO Yi-Chun and CHANG Wen-Hsuan which had been partly removed ahead of the typhoon, I regretfully admit that, under the weather effects of sea winds, torrential rains, and salt corrosion, acts of commemoration are not as sure or permanent as we think – they are indeed quite petty.
The state of Leeroy NEW's Balangay/Barangay (Vessel/Village) (2023) after a typhoon. Photo by HSU Chu-Chun
At the same time, Green Island bears the marks of the White Terror and a projected imagination of the community. To researchers, it is often a “lasting landscape” (le paysage après-coup) of a traumatic event; after the trauma, it leaves a scar that can never be soothed, to remain on the island and change with the passage of time and future interpretations. What has been inscribed bears witness to history. The landscapes that stand as witness gradually coalesce into common ground for nationality and identification through various discourses, eventually becoming the fixed symbols by which people attach their own imaginations of history.
The monument listing the victims at the Green Island White Terror Memorial Park on the coast of Gongguan marks the typical way of understanding the traumatized landscape above: to establish an anchor point of memory at the actual site of the traumatic event. The narrative of this monument has evolved through state-directed commemorative activities such as the annual gatherings of more than 400 victims and their families since 2000 or so, commemorating the “history of the fight for freedom and human rights” in Taiwan from the February 28th Incident to the White Terror. After more than a decade of commemorative activities, this has almost become an entrenched discourse on February 28th and the White Terror, and has influenced the development of Taiwan’s subjective identity.
Such a formation of subjective identity can also be dangerous. In “Beyond Commemoration: The 2-28 Incident, the Aesthetics of Trauma and Sexual Difference” (2014), Elsa Hsiang-Chun CHEN has long asked questions about the February 28th commemoration and its historicization, pointing out how it has shaped the new Taiwanese national discourse as well as cultural identities and traditions, both material and immaterial, as in Pierre NORA’s concept of “lieu de mémoire” (“place of memory”). CHEN keenly points out that the Memorial Park in the context of Taiwan further perpetuates traumatic through the structures of trauma, defense, neurosis, and repression.
If commemoration in the community leads to this kind of closed cycle, then perhaps what we must think about is not just “how we sustain the discussions of unjust history”, but rather “can there possibly be another, more fragile form of commemoration?” It’s a fragile form of commemoration that is at the same time a collective action of the community (co-), a work of memory based on experience (-memoration), and at the same time full of breaks, conflicts, and differences internally. Can such a thing exist? In what way shall it exist?
The traces inscribed on the island bear witness to the history that once existed. Photo by HSU Chu-Chun
Since the 1990s, the form of commemoration seems to have changed again; since the first Green Island Human Rights Art Festival Visiting no. 15 Liumagou in 2019 to last year’s newly adopted biennial format in Listening to The Overtones of Fissures, contemporary art has been systematically introduced to the island. To residents of Green Island and even the political victims and their families, most artists are viewed as “outsiders” to the island, and “latecomers” in commemorating the White Terror. Artists approach Green Island and its history with trepidation amidst the suspicion, and even as the curators of the art festivals repeatedly try to draw artists, residents, and victims’ families closer through various co-creation, co-learning, and on-site surveys, the rift remains.
TSAI Mei-Chuan of the National Human Rights Museum, as the first line of communication between the museum and the Art Festival, mentions in the interview “Reflecting on the Green Island Human Rights Art Festival: Green Island Perspective” (TUNG Yung-Wei, 2021), that “the residents’ wariness grows with each passing year”, signaling the immune response triggered by arrival of artists. The tension between the two parties, islanders and mainlanders, underneath the various discourses that connect locally and reflect upon the contemporary, does in fact obscure the issues on the island beneath the various official discourses. Artists and researchers come from the main island of Taiwan to collect materials through interviews and readings, while residents and political victims stand amid repeated scrutiny and questioning, caught in between.
Past commemorations at the park that adhere to established discourses and ideologies clearly cannot decribe this kind of tension. On the contrary, the immune response to the “contamination” of the island from research activities reflects how the historical narrative shaped by monuments may have been just an inflexible illusion, and that the so-called lasting commemoration cannot really exist on the Green Island. The intertwining factors, from inclement weather and natural conditions on the island to the divisions of identities and desires within the commemorative actions, has in fact led to the dissolution of commemoration of White Terror on Green Island. The said “fragile commemoration” is a mode of commemoration that has developed under the natural conditions of Green Island and vicissitudes of interpersonal and political tensions.
Another form of fragile commemoration, can it exist? In what form shall it exist? Photo by HSU Chu-Chun
On the hottest afternoon following the typhoons, I walked into the exhibition space of LIU Chi-Tung’s Sceneries Posted by Those Who Came Later, which was a prison cell in the Bagua Building. As I was losing my ability to think in the stifling air, I caught a note posted by the artist on the corner of the wall: “It must be very stifling and uncomfortable in this space, so please bear with it, sit down and read a few stories, pick a postcard, and write down your thoughts about the landscape.”
Yes, “bear with it”. Unlike a temperature and humidity controlled white box, Green Island calls for a tougher will to withstand. Here, the artist is not trying to preach to the audience, nor will she recount the hardships of former political victims inside the prison. What she talks about is the difficulty of standing in the exhibition space right now, as a latecomer to history, as an outsider to the island, and as a viewer. Before I saw her message, I had not thought about the kind of physical and psychological trials we would be subject to on Green Island, and how much effort it would take to face of the history of the White Terror, or even just to sit down and gloss over the message fragments made by the artist.
Scene of the exhibition Sceneries Posted by Those Who Came Later at Oasis Villa Bagua Building, 2023 Green Island Human Rights Art Festival – Listening to The Overtones of Fissures. Photo courtesy of LIU Chi-Tung
For the sake of research, I stayed at the exhibition to read through LIU Chi-Tung’s work left on a small bamboo chair and the many postcards hanging by the window. Within the half hour or so, a few scattered visitors stuck their heads through the door and left straightaway. What is it that drives other travelers to come to this outlying island, to this stifling, dreary old prison, to sit down and read this distant and convoluted narrative, or even to write down their private thoughts? Perhaps LIU Chi-Tung’s writing provides a clue to my ponderings: on this island, it’s not possible to form a commemoration of the consciousness collectively; what really exists in this harsh environment is a state of constant distraction and fragmentation.
The work’s perception of the landscape already reflected this fragmentary state: “those who came later” revisits a large collection of images left by political victim CHEN Meng-He during his imprisonment on Green Island, coming back to the original site to take new photographs for comparison and produce five written pieces. For example, in “A Rock with Lettering on Its Back”, the writer refers to archival photographs to locate a stone inscribed with the words “Wu Wang Zai Jyu (meaning “remember the defeat”)”. At the time, CHEN Meng-He refused to photograph the political slogan, so he photographed the stone from behind. From the front of the stone inscribed with the slogan of the Nationalist government, to the back of the stone where the political victim turns to, to the narrator LIU Chi-Tung, who was “born after martial law” and “grew up reading textbooks not sanctioned by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation” and who “once mistook ‘Wu Wang Zai Jyu’ for ‘Wu Wang Zai Lue’”, these three perspectives coexist in these two contrasting photographs, and within these incompatible interpretations of history, they leave behind memories each to their own.
CHEN Meng-He, Those Who Came Later, LIU Chi-Tung, 2023, A Rock with Lettering on Its Back, Sceneries Posted by Those Who Came Later. Postcard, text, online platform, installation. Photo courtesy of LIU Chi-Tung
Is it possible that the lack of consensus and incoherent memory is in fact a form of remembrance on Green Island that had developed under its intense natural conditions and the different ethnic identities and ideologies? Or perhaps that it better relates to the reality most people experience? In such a memorial full of variance, people and landscapes cannot really become witnesses, nor can they form a collective memory, since their respective testimonies may well nullify each other’s claims. Even the landscape, which is constantly being eroded and transformed by the intense weather, confirms the fallibility of the testimony. These conflicting perspectives exist simultaneously in the name of “commemoration”, but prevent commemorations from becoming lasting and unfailing collective memories, or even coalesce into a singular collective identity.
How then can these conflicting memories be memorialized? Setting out from Green Island and after enduring an hour of violent storms, I finally came upon LIU Chi-Tung’s first or perhaps the final work in this exhibition, That Unreachable Island, at the pier of Fugang Fishing Port. She set CHEN Meng-He’s photo of Green Island, as shot from the main island, upside down and placed it at the dock. In the artist’s eyes, Green Island is an island that rises from the dizzying motions of the boat’s rocking and swaying, making it impossible to focus on, floating distantly in the wind, rain, and waves.
Sceneries Posted by Those Who Came Later, exhibited at the boarding ramps of Fugang Fishing Port. 2023 Green Island Human Rights Art Festival – Listening to The Overtones of Fissures. Photo by HUANG Ya-Nung, courtesy of Goldilocks Production.
This work suggests a parallax viewing method: retrospection, projection, and counterpoint. LIU Chi-Tung has been in residence on Green Island since the 2021 season, continuing her work to this day1. Repeatedly shifting viewpoints and journeying to the main island of Taiwan as part of her residency involves a projected view of Green Island; when she arrives at Green Island, she inevitably projects the desires of the main island. The mutual “projection” of the two places is in fact based on the unseen disorientation of the imagination, the reproduction of symbols in the established narrative. However, retrospection is not just about visual movements, but also about the alignment of the body. LIU Chi-Tung came to YANG Kui’s former residence in Tunghai Garden, visited the landscapes of Green Island with its history, and then returned to Green Island again the following year to learn open water swimming with the residents, learning to perceive with her body and trying to return to the scenes referenced in the historical materials, research materials, and oral narratives, but have since disappeared. This action is not to verify the authenticity of history, but to indirectly project the parallax between her and the past on which she trains her gaze, a past that has been disjointed in time and space.
As a latecomer to history, both the artist and the viewer will see the projection of the main island of Taiwan when looking at Green Island, and from this, the historical burden that Green Island carries. At the same time, we can only use our own bodies as counterpoints to the living experiences of the victims of the White Terror and the residents of Green Island, thus proving again the rift between ourselves, the White Terror, and Green Island. In this process, the multiple overlapping of lines of sight on Green Island is not a collective memory, but a reality where contradictory experiences and historical perceptions coexist: it is an island that vaguely emerges in retrospection, projection, and counterpoint.
Scene of the exhibition Sceneries Posted by Those Who Came Later at Oasis Villa Bagua Building. 2023 Green Island Human Rights Art Festival – Listening to The Overtones of Fissures. Photo courtesy of LIU Chi-Tung
