On a recent typhoony day in Taipei, I took advantage of a break in the gale-force winds to trek over to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum 台北市立美術館. I originally assumed I would just go into the least crowded gallery, but this plan was thwarted by the fact that the typhoon seems to have kept most people away from the museum, meaning I practically had the place to myself. As a result, I defaulted to the closest exhibition.
The gallery that I drifted into turned out to be the solo exhibition of the up-and-coming experimental film artist Zhang Xuzhan 張徐展, Jungle Jungle 複眼叢林. On the one hand, I remain in awe of Zhang’s creativity and technical virtuosity. But as I think back on the content of the exhibit (rather than the medium or the artist’s technical control), I become uneasy.
I still haven’t entirely sorted through this nagging feeling that this exhibition is more complicated than the sum of its technical parts. But my thoughts continue to bounce between ideas of artistic prowess, the king-making power of flagship cultural institutions, and the ethics of representation.
The Art
At the entrance to Jungle Jungle, visitors are greeted by a small pile of broken glass. A carefully aimed light creates artful reflections on the green wall, and draws attention to the (obviously artificial) dead fly perched on top, whose exaggeratedly iridescent green eye (the “compound eye” 複眼 of the exhibit’s Chinese title) reflects the wall color.
In the next room, a series of small platforms along the wall play host to a dozen or so artfully posed rat-like figurines. Their spindly legs and lanky torsos remind me strongly of Freya in Final Fantasy IX, while their inscrutable expressions bring to mind the wizened figure of Nicodemus in the film adaption of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (a great film that elicited enough terror in me as a child that it probably ruined one or two holidays for my parents).
Despite the fact that the figurines are all posed on individual platforms and under individual spotlights, you could be forgiven for missing them. The room is dominated by a diorama-cum-monolith that looks nothing so much like a Tim Burton-esque art project on steroids—Tim Burton-esque in that it is dark, fantastical, twisted, whimsical, and minutely detailed; on steroids in that this thing is literally the size of a small swimming pool.
The bulk of the structure is made of what seems to be the most luxe papier-mâché you ever did see, although various acetates, beads, strings, wires, and foils are also in evidence. (In fact, the artist’s bio describes his practice as based on zhizha 紙紮, or traditional Taoist paper arts. That said, the general dearth of explanation in the exhibition itself makes ready-to-hand associations with papier-mâché hard to avoid.)
Within the massive jungle and pool are arrayed a series of vignettes. The rat-like figures (sometimes edging into vulpine territory) scattered throughout the forest are alternately stalking, crouching, hiding from, or evading the crocodiles, crabs, and aquatic cousins of the dog-dragon from The Neverending Story. The figurines hold tiered red parasols that give off strong Southeast Asian vibes, and beat large red drums. Most strikingly, a large clearing in the forest plays host to what is unmistakably a murine gamelan ensemble. (And because I’m an ethnomusicologist … we’ll get back to the gamelan in a bit.)
Finally, in the exhibition’s third room (ringed again by the now-familiar figurines), there is a large projection screen. Here, the true nature of the enormous installation in the previous room is revealed: not diorama, not sculpture, but movie set.
The film is a non-narrative, high-drama piece lasting 16 minutes. Visually, it shows various rat figurines repeatedly leaping over the voracious denizens of the roiling acetate river. Meanwhile, the drum-heavy soundtrack and the aleatoric gamelan chimes—reinforced by repeated shots showing circles of drummers and gamelan players—bespeak a mysterious, undefined ritual. Later scenes revealing the rat figures to be people hiding under ornate costumes heightens the sense of ritual.
In the final scene, one of the main figures leaps a little too slowly—their leg is bitten off by a crocodile (or is it an aquatic dog-dragon?) The soundtrack goes silent, until the body shatters into a thousand pieces of glass, which the flies begin to gather and push into a pile.
The final scene of the short film thus reveals the structure of the exhibit. From the pile of glass at the entrance (complete with fly) and the unexplained figures arrayed around the periphery of each room, to the massive structure that dominates so much of the show’s visual space, the entire exhibit rebuilds Zhang’s short film in reverse.
But the film itself, presented with little explanation, also sparked the questions that continue to nag at me.
The Prestige
When we talk about art, it’s really hard to separate it from questions of prestige. Why was the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg footing Mozart’s bills? A good part of it was prestige, and the way that prestige props up politics. Why did Singapore (or Taipei, or Kuala Lumpur, or Sydney, or New York, or, or, or ... ) invest millions in a gleaming new arts complex? Again, prestige plays a big role. Why did the Nazi government recruit Richard Strauss, the Maoist government Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳, or the US government Louis Armstrong? Prestige, prestige, prestige.
In a prestige-based economy, institutions have meaning. When the Metropolitan Opera fired Maria Callas, it wasn’t just an HR decision. It pitted the prestige of the opera house against that of their biggest star. When the UNC Board of Trustees chose to ignore the recommendation of the university’s tenure committee to deny tenure to a Pulitzer-prize-winning, MacArthur-prize-winning faculty member (who *just* *so* *happens* to be *purely* *coincidentally* a woman of color), they contravened longstanding academic practices of shared governance in order to strictly delimit the kinds of prestige that will—and will not—receive institutional acknowledgment.
Similarly, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum was founded as a prestige institution whose stated goals include, “To promote exchanges with the global community … to enhance [Taipei’s] international visibility … and to help form the public memory.” Thus, when a rising star like Zhang Xuzhan gets a solo exhibition at a national museum like TFAM, the museum is not just acknowledging a young artist’s rapidly growing prestige, as reflected in honors like his Golden Horse Award 金馬獎 nomination (sort of like the Sinophone version of an Oscar nod) for Best Animated Short Film, or his 2021 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award. The museum’s curatorial staff are also adding their institution’s prestige into the mix, announcing that this is what they would like to be known for in the “global community,” and priming works like Jungle Jungle to enter the “public memory.”
This is just how the arts work, right? In fact, forget the arts, this is just how the world works, right? Jobs beget more jobs; grant beget more grants; gigs beget more gigs.
Well, sure … But that doesn’t mean it’s not complicated.
The Ethics
When we talk about the sometimes-symbiotic, sometimes-parasitic ménage à trois between artists, institutions, and prestige, context counts. What is the context of Jungle, Jungle?
Well, to start, it’s currently on display at one of Taiwan’s flagship arts institutions. On the one hand, the kind of prestige crafted here is admirably democratic—the regular cost of admission is NT$30 (that’s about US$0.97 as of mid-September 2022), which certainly signals a commitment to “art for the people.”
But then we get back to the gamelans of Jungle, Jungle. You see, despite the fact that the fantastical rodents, crocodiles, and river-dragon-dogs of the installation provide plausible deniability, the jungles and tiered umbrellas point our imaginations towards Southeast Asia, while the repeated gamelan motif concretizes Indonesia as an imaginative source.1 In short, an imagined primitive rainforest is brought to the concrete jungle of Taipei, and held up for urban audiences as an exoticized Other through the museum’s democratizing project.
This all unfolds in a Taiwanese context in which Southeast Asian foreign labor from Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia provides the majority of Taiwan’s factory labor, as well as a huge proportion of in-home care for the elderly. As of 2022, there are almost 670,000 migrant workers in Taiwan—a not-insignificant demographic for an island of about 23.5 million people (and falling).
And yet, migrant workers in Taiwan still lack basic rights, such as the right to change employers at will, even when employers have reneged on pay obligations, or when working conditions are unsafe.
This sets up a social backdrop in which people from certain parts of the world are identified as being of “lower value” than other people. And lest we’re tempted to chalk this up to the sad-but-unavoidable realities of late capitalism, we can look at the offspring of Taiwan’s mixed marriages: children born to a local parent and “certain kinds” of immigrants (usually from Southeast Asia) are now classified by the government as “the new second generation” 新二代, a lifelong designation that affects school registrations, government services, and the like. It also singles them out as inherently different from the children of dual-Taiwanese couples, or even the children of a Taiwanese parent and “the right kind of immigrant.”2
It would be one thing if Jungle, Jungle were by an Indonesian artist, or even a “new second generation” artist drawing on an Indonesian-ish iconography to tell their story. After all, as James Clifford points out, self-stereotyping can be a survival strategy of marginalized groups in the face of curtailed economic and educational opportunities.3
But Zhang Xuzhan does not fall into this category. Rather, he stresses his heritage as the scion of a Taoist paper art family, and talks about the “universals” of global mythologies. This is all well and good, but when said universals inevitably return to exoticizing, primitivizing narratives—this film literally blurs the line between human and animal characters—we would do well to question why a universal tale needs to rehearse narratives that diminish Southeast Asians in an environment where their basic legal rights are already sharply curtailed. Indeed, this quest for primitivizing universals is among the reasons that scholars like Lévi-Strauss are treated with greater caution today than they were 60 years ago.4
Similarly, this also brings up questions in my mind about the way that Taiwan is perceived on a global scale. Literary scholar James English has commented that although international arts prizes have increasingly gone to non-Western practitioners, these organizations overwhelmingly tend to reward people who are foreign in “the right way.” In other words, it’s not just about being “Ghanaian enough,” or “Chinese enough,” it’s also about conforming to certain preconceived notions about what these identity categories mean.5 In thinking about Zhang Xuzhan’s primitivist corpus, I cannot help but wonder how his work fits into, reflects, and/or shapes international attitudes toward Taiwan, especially when exhibited overseas.
So … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that Zhang Xuzhan’s exhibit was breathtaking in many ways. And as a performer, I think it’s critical that we avoid artistic paralysis. Artists need to be allowed to think, to experiment, to dream. And if we’re open to the idea of experimentation, then we also have to create space for artistic misfires, fizzles, and failures.
But that doesn’t mean that we owe artists unalloyed praise. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t remain alert to the ways in which institutional prestige shapes the voices to which audiences have access. Zhang Xuzhan should be allowed to think through mythology’s universals. But we as audiences should also push him, and others like him, to grow past primitivist stereotypes about a generic, exoticized Southeast Asian-cum-Other.
In the end, art should help us think, providing a locus for contemplation and discussion. And this exhibit certainly provides food for thought.
In audio commentary that is only available through the museum’s app (which receives a 1-star rating on the Apple app store), the artist confirms Indonesia as an inspiration.
For example, the scholar presenting on this topic, National Taiwan University sociology professor Dr. Pei-Chia Lan 藍佩嘉, pointed out that none of the offspring of the doctorate-brandishing Americans in her audience would be deemed “new second generation” children.
James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
See, e.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).