From Cold War to Post-Cold War: Artistic and Socio-Historical Comparisons between Taiwan and Philippines (1970s to 1990s)

Principle Investigator：Hui-Yu TANG, Postdoctoral Researcher, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（2020-2022）

This project takes the Third Worldism during Cold War to the globalization era at the end of the Cold War as the historical trajectory. It firstly examines the history of international art exhibitions on the Global South, and then moves on to explore specifically the artistic and socio-historical comparisons between Taiwan and the Philippines, in order to see the changing formation of the "Third World/Global South" discourse from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period. The first part of this project reviews the international art exhibitions from 1980s to 1990s, in order to look at the geopolitical paradigm that is formed. The second part of this project takes Taiwanese artist Lee Shuang-tze’s writings and art works in the 1970s as an example to look at the interconnected colonial and Cold War histories between Taiwan and the Philippines, and also to explore the artistic connection between the two in the 1970s through social realism. This research further analyzes that when entering the 1990s the globalization era, the comparison between Taiwan and the Philippines has changed from the Third Worldism to the narrative of transnational migration within the global capital hierarchical system. I will take Philippine artist Sid Gomez Hildawa’s works exhibited in Hong Kong and Taipei as an example, to discuss how the narratives of transnational migration are presented in art works and curatorial discourse since the 1990s.