Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Image credit: Lo Yi-Chun, Ethanol Distillery (2020). / Photo by the author.
During the Second World War, Taiwan was positioned as the logistical base and military springboard from which Japan sustained its war effort in the South Seas. The Japanese Army and Navy built airfields across the island—at Hsinchu, Taichung, Chiayi, Pingtung, Yilan, and elsewhere—turning Taiwan into what was then called an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” For most ordinary Taiwanese, the lived experience of aerial bombardment is remembered chiefly through the Taiwan Air Battle of 1944 and the island-wide bombing campaigns of 1945. This particular history also set Taiwan’s experience of air war sharply apart from that of Japan, the colonial metropole.
Taiwan’s experience of air war was not centred on the visuality of the sky, but on the bodily mobilisation of the ground. Traces of this observation surface in the works of two contemporary Taiwanese artists: Hsu Chia-Wei’s (許家維) Drones, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the Deceased (2017) 《飛行器、霜毛蝠、逝者證言》 and Lo Yi-Chun’s (羅懿君) Lat Pulldown Machine—NIK2-J (2020) 《滑輪下拉機—紫電號》 and Ethanol Distillery (2020) 《糖蜜酒精櫥》. Both artists respond to the material memory of wartime logistics and transform what “air war” itself can be taken to mean. Rather than entering the history of air war through the position of the human victims, both artists take as their point of departure the raw materials of science, industry, and economic crops. Within the modernisation that wartime agriculture and military industry mutually reinforced, they trace how an agricultural commodity was refined into aviation fuel—Hsu surfacing “a private memory cast aside by grand historical narrative,” and Lo tracking the shifting valences of sugar as it moved from a cash crop to household staple to military material to gym equipment today, thereby exposing the hidden compulsions sugar has long exerted on human life. Yet if we approach these works through the lens of aerial-war logistics, they open onto a logistical material history that grand historical narratives have systematically forgotten. This observation prompts an interesting reframing: the air-war experience of wartime Taiwanese was a military-logistics trajectory inscribed on the ground. The Taiwanese experience of aerial warfare during World War II was shaped by military-logistical trajectories inscribed on the ground.
I. How Did Sugarcane Become Aviation Fuel? Building the Empire’s “Raw Material to Fuel” Logistics Base for Air War
Under Japanese rule, the colonial government continued the molasses-liquor industry that Taiwan had already developed under the Qing, converting it from a foodstuff—refined white sugar—into an industrial raw material: molasses was fermented into alcohol for industrial and pharmaceutical use. As Japanese industry expanded, demand for industrial alcohol rose, and it became an important chemical export. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Japan issued a national fuel policy and began domestically https://tcmb.culture.tw/zh-tw/detail?indexCode=Culture_Event&id=249173. This research was assigned to the Government-General of Taiwan’s Sugar Industry Experimental Station, established in 1933, which succeeded in producing anhydrous alcohol as a gasoline substitute. During the war, sugar refineries across Taiwan installed attached alcohol plants—more than a dozen in total. Some of this alcohol was shipped back to Japan, but a greater share went directly to Japanese army and navy air units stationed in Taiwan and across the Nan’yō (the South Seas) (南洋), forming a crucial logistical foundation for the fuel demands of the war’s final years.
In the same period, Japan’s wartime state established the Sixth Fuel Factory (日本海軍第六燃料廠)(commonly abbreviated “Liu Ran,” 六燃), a fuel facility purpose-built for the war. Anticipating that any fuel base would draw bombing raids, planners chose its sites not only for access to raw materials, harbours, and airfields, but also to avoid concentrating production in any single location and thereby limit the damage that air raids could inflict. The Sixth Fuel Factory was accordingly divided into three sites: the main plant at Kaohsiung, built in 1942, tasked chiefly with refining crude oil shipped in from the South Seas; and two branch factories built in 1943, at Hsinchu and at Hsinkao (near present-day Taichung Harbour). The Hsinchu branch factory’s principal task was to synthesise “isooctane”—a compound that could boost the performance of aviation fuel—from butanol, a byproduct of the local sugar industry. Compared to the Kaohsiung factory, which depended on imported crude, the Hsinchu branch carried the heavier burden of national self-sufficiency in fuel production in the war’s final years. The Hsinchu factory opened in 1944, the same year it was subjected to Allied carpet bombing; Japan surrendered before the factory ever reached full operation. It survives today as Taiwan’s largest extant World War II military-industrial ruin. This demonstrates that, under Japanese rule, Taiwan had developed a complete military-industrial chain running from raw materials to finished fuel.
II. Intervening in Air-War Memory through the Matter of Fuel: Hsu Chia-Wei and Lo Yi-Chun
Lo Yi-Chun’s Lat Pulldown Machine—NIK2-J (2020) 《滑輪下拉機—紫電號》 is a mixed-media installation in which the artist refashions bagasse (甘蔗渣)—the fibrous residue left over from sugar refining—into a set of farm implements, which are then assembled into the form of a large fighter plane. The whole structure simultaneously incorporates the mechanical principle of a “lat pulldown machine,” a piece of gym equipment, producing an object that is at once a war-plane silhouette and a fitness device. The work extends sugar’s symbolic reach across three images—agricultural produce, commercial commodity, and military fuel—tracing the shifting value of cane sugar as it passes through each. It further folds in the contemporary fitness culture’s anxious calculus of “calories,” the need to cut and control sugar intake; alongside this transformation of raw material into energy, the work asks viewers to reckon with the labour that war itself demands, through the physical effort required to hoist a giant agricultural war-plane. Meanwhile, Ethanol Distillery (2020) 《糖蜜酒精櫥》 lines up a row of amber alcohol bottles filled with molasses to construct a laboratory-like wall, referencing how, under wartime pressure, Taiwan’s sugar factories under Japanese rule once used molasses to accelerate the development of aviation alcohol fuel—a modernising process condensed into a single cabinet.
Hsu Chia-Wei’s Drones, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the Deceased (2017) 《飛行器、霜毛蝠、逝者證言》 tells the story of the Sixth Naval Fuel Factory (“Liu Ran,” 六燃) in Hsinchu. This video piece pairs drone footage with a narrated voiceover drawn from memoirs. Liu Ran (六燃) was a scientific research facility established by Japan’s wartime government, tasked during the war with developing and producing butanol, an aviation fuel additive that increased combustion efficiency. The abandoned military-industrial site today layers prewar industrial ruins together with the postwar military dependents’ village (眷村) built after the KMT government’s relocation to Taiwan; its towering chimney is the sole habitat in Taiwan of the Formosan leaf-nosed bat (霜毛蝠). Hsu films the factory from an aerial view by drone, the camera weaving through the ruins of Liu Ran (六燃) accompanied by the only non-human “camera operator” present, the bat. Over this footage, a voiceover assembled from the memoirs of nineteen former factory workers plays against archival images of American bombing runs. A computer program randomises the sequence of playback, so that each screening yields a different order and structure—rendering the ambiguity inherent to memory itself.
To be continued in Part Two.
Tsai Min-Ying graduated from the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Taiwan University. She has worked as a researcher at an economic think tank and held museum-related positions. A recipient of the National Culture and Arts Foundation’s “Phenomenon Writing—Visual Art Criticism” grant, she runs the arts-and-culture Instagram page “obsession in material” and continues to ride the highs and lows of writing on art and visual media.
Website: https://tsaiminying.wordpress.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/obsession_in_material/?hl=en
This piece was sponsored by the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation, under the Visual Art Criticism Project.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Beneath the Aerial Gaze: War, Memory, and Contemporary Art in Taiwan’.