Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Image credit: Hsu Chia-Wei, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the Deceased (2017). / Photo by the author.
Part I of this article traces how Taiwan’s wartime air war was built from the ground up, through the transformation of sugar, labour, and industrial infrastructure into the fuel and logistical systems that sustained Japanese military aviation. Following the first half of the article, this part continues to explore the wartime mobilisation and the air war that did not only take place in the air through artists Hsu Chia-Wei and Lo Yi-Chun’s works.
III. Two Non-Human Viewpoints on the Logistics of Perception: The Drone and the Bat
The industrial and military history sketched above makes the concrete link between Taiwan’s sugar industry and military aviation fuel difficult to miss: butanol, a product of molasses fermentation, was one of the Japanese navy’s key fuel feedstocks during the war, and Taiwan—Japan’s largest colonial sugar producer—saw its agricultural infrastructure absorbed into the logistical apparatus of the air force, becoming a frontline experimental base for wartime military-industrial development. The two industries occupied complementary positions in a single chain—upstream raw-material production (molasses refined into butanol) and downstream synthesis (butanol synthesised into isooctane)—together constituting the conditions that made Japan’s wartime air war possible.
This history has rarely been discussed within Taiwan’s collective memory of the Second World War, precisely because, within a war narrative centred on human memory, it offers no sensational visual event of bombing and casualty, but instead lies hidden as a system of logistical material transformation beneath the war itself. The central claim of the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception is that the logistical apparatus of war and the production apparatus of the image are the same mechanism: military mobility (aircraft, tanks, missiles) and visual machinery (reconnaissance cameras, radar, targeting systems) co-evolved across the history of technology, such that an aircraft’s ascent was never only a means of “seeing” (reconnoitering) the enemy, but a medium through which “seeing” itself became possible. Virilio’s concept of the “logistics of perception” names this idea—that the conditions of visual production are the conditions of military mobilisation—and Hsu’s work faintly echoes Virilio’s framework: by filming, via drone, the very fuel plant that once allowed warplanes to take to the air, Hsu lets viewers see the “infrastructure” that made “seeing” itself operable, so that the act of filming reenacts, in itself, a logistical logic.
Hsu juxtaposes three lines within a single frame—the drone’s line of sight, the bat’s dwelling, and the charred documents of the burned Liu Ran factory—letting the building’s material remains speak for themselves: the great chimney still bears scars from air raids; the abandoned factory floor is the residue of fuel production, the detritus of an imperial logistics base. Within this single frame, Hsu sets two non-human viewpoints side by side: the drone’s vision and the bat’s hearing. The drone re-performs the structure of logistical perception—flight, overview, recording—but its object is now a fuel factory already abandoned; the drone’s gaze becomes, as it were, the abandoned factory’s gaze turned back on its own material remains, a gaze that folds back on itself. By contrast, the bat’s presence inserts into the drone’s visual circuit a mode of perception that no image can capture: the bat merely dwells there, sensing the historical absence that images cannot reach through sound. Notably, Virilio’s theoretical framework remains centred on vision, his argument built almost entirely on visual material, with little transposed to other senses such as hearing, touch, or smell. Hsu’s work thus deploys vision and hearing together with some subtlety, asking what the image produced by logistical perception can show—and, just as systematically, what it cannot.
IV. Whose Labour? The Audience’s Body and the Absent History of Colonial Labour
Hsu Chia-Wei and Lo Yi-Chun occupy quite different perceptual positions with respect to the “material system of wartime logistics.” Where Hsu’s work centres on vision and hearing, attending to the distance and randomness of seeing, approaching this WWII history obliquely, Lo instead emphasises the active intervention and operation of the body: she works directly with bagasse, tobacco, and plaster, transforming agricultural waste (bagasse) into the shape of weaponised gym equipment, while the title Lat Pulldown Machine—NIK2-J (2020) sets the imagery of fitness equipment alongside the name of a weapon, a fighter plane, posing the question of how raw material becomes fuel, how fuel accelerates a plane’s ascent, how the plane drops its bombs, and how those bombs turn more ground into ruin. She compresses this entire chain into the shape of a single object, so that the viewer, in the very motion of “using gym equipment,” comes to feel the weight of a history that otherwise resists easy recognition.
Moreover, Lat Pulldown Machine—NIK2-J (2020) carries a distinctive structural feature: it requires the mobilisation of the audience’s own body. Gym equipment is a device for enhancing bodily capacity; the war plane is a device that outsources bodily capacity to the machine while making other bodies disappear. The work compresses these two logics of the body into a single object—even as the audience “enhances” themselves, what they are operating is a bomb-dropping aircraft. This contradiction within body politics is part of what gives the work its charge. To grasp the political dimension of this contradiction, one must first situate the disciplinary logic that gym equipment already carries in the present. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, argues that modern society manages the body by inducing it to “voluntarily” repeat specific movements—military drill, factory labour, and school callisthenics all shape the body into a machine that submits to a particular function. Gym equipment extends this same logic: people “voluntarily” adopt a standardised set of movements to manage their own bodies, refashioning themselves into more efficient units of production.
Lo’s work layers these three disciplinary logics atop one another: the body of colonial agricultural labour (the cane farmer’s repetitive toil), the body of wartime military-industrial mobilisation (the technician’s productive labour), and the body of contemporary fitness culture (the self-managing consumer) are all strung together by the same motion. Even as people believe themselves to be merely exercising, the body is in fact rehearsing a labour chain of colonial modernity, from the cane farmer’s repetitive toil, to the productive rhythms of wartime military mobilisation, to the self-management of contemporary fitness culture.
This, in turn, surfaces another invisibility: the bodies strung along this industrial labour chain are almost absent from the historical writing of the Second World War. Existing national narratives give us pilots, the stories of boy aviators, the decisions of commanders, the outcomes of battles, but the body of the cane farmer, the factory technician, the fuel-plant worker is missing from the nation’s narrative.
The practices of these two artists also mark a broader turn in how art intervenes in war memory: away from a focus on human traumatic experience, and toward the material transformation of “things” as the organising axis, from which human memory and experience are then drawn outward. Each, through a different strategy, takes up the same underlying question: how can the logistical history of labour that has already vanished, already been forgotten, be made perceptible again? Hsu chooses a non-human viewpoint, circumventing the limits of human perception; Lo’s answer is mobilisation and intervention, making the viewer’s own body the conductive medium of history.
V. Conclusion: Air War Did Not Happen Only in the Air
In a sense, the Second World War was a war of fuel, and fuel’s sources were never only petroleum, but also the full range of organic raw materials that imperial colonial agricultural systems could be made to convert. Taiwan’s sugar industry occupied a singular position within this system—its degree of modernisation, in mechanised refineries, railway transport, and scientific agricultural management, made it precisely the infrastructure on which wartime military supply could be built. Here “modernisation” and “militarisation” formed a mutually reinforcing structure, each driving the other forward.
This essay has tried to respond to how Taiwan’s colonial position under Japanese rule during the Second World War shaped a distinct experience of air war. I take “ground intervention into the imagination of the sky” as the route of inquiry, pointing directly to the fact that sugar refineries and fuel factories were the ground conditions that made flight itself possible—so that the experience of air war cannot be seen only through the visual frame of “aerial imagery,” nor reduced merely to the ground-level experience of being bombed. Both artists choose military ruins or agricultural waste as the medium through which to approach the system of air war, reversing the common perceptual assumption about what “air war” entails: air war never happened only in the sky; fuel production on the ground was the material precondition for aerial mobility and manoeuvre. Once we begin attending to the logistical material history of air war, a new path opens for approaching this history.
Furthermore, the writing of Taiwan’s wartime logistical material history is itself necessarily “unfinished”—because military archives were burned, because colonial memory has been structurally repressed. After all, this history never entered the nation’s grand narrative. Both artists pose the same question: what position did Taiwan’s sugar workers, farmers, factory technicians, and researchers occupy within this wartime system? Were they merely passive participants, or did they possess some form of agency? By having viewers physically “use” a war-plane-shaped farm implement, Lo poses to the viewer a question of body politics: in operating this device, whose labour are we rehearsing?
Meanwhile, Hsu takes the memoirs of Liu Ran’s former employees as his primary text, not only describing the course of the war, but recording many details of daily life: during the two or three years after the war when the workers awaited the KMT government’s takeover, they recalled catching frogs, brewing liquor, and other small particulars of factory life, adding texture to this otherwise blank stretch of history. And because the war came to an abrupt halt before the Hsinchu factory was ever formally brought into operation, the Hsinchu Liu Ran factory remained, in effect, suspended in a perpetual state of readiness for a war that never fully arrived—leaving the individual memories of its fuel-factory workers stranded in a kind of temporal vacuum. What art can do, in intervening in this history, may not be to “complete” it, but simply to render its ruptures and its absences faithfully.
Sponsored by the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation, under the Visual Art Criticism Project.
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 article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Beneath the Aerial Gaze: War, Memory, and Contemporary Art in Taiwan’.