The Temporary and the Bricolage: Reading Taipei in Photographic and Cinematic Images

Principle Investigator：Louis Lo

In the age of what Ackbar Abbas calls “the poverty of images,” we can no longer understand a city from its mediated images. The image of the city is “poor” not because its resolution is not high enough, but because there is a disconnection between image and city. The more images we have, the less we understand about the city. This is even more so in places where the colonial power left but no real decolonization takes place, such as Hong Kong, Macao, and arguably Taiwan. How can we recognize such a situation, a place which has been officially de-colonized without real decolonialization, a post-colonial situation which never goes beyond neo-coloniality? The problem becomes even more severe but obscure in the age of globalization following a neo-liberal logic whereby a heterogenous social norm seems to suppress every domain in civic lives. One can only get a distorted impression from images, for they are only clichéd representation, be it propaganda, advertisement, entertainment, or art. Abbas calls for a critical analysis of the city’s cultural productions (such as cinema, architecture, design, new media). Meaningful ways of approaching the city, therefore, cannot be done without an awareness of the medium of the image itself. Inspired by Abbas’s insight, this project aims to examine the representation of Taipei in photographic and cinematic images, especially traces of colonialization, changes in cityscape due to genitalization, and a combination of the two factors. The project focuses on films made by Edward Yang and his contemporizes, especially Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Ling, for their interests in representing the city or using the city as a setting for the story. Apart from analysis of cinematic images, this project also aims to take photographic images of contemporary Taipei to show its rapid changes due to an uncritical embracing of neo-liberalism. The photographs will stress the temporary and bricolage nature of the cityscape under the complication and paradoxical effects of “post(phoned)-colonialism” mentioned above.