Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Image credit: Chiu Tzu-Yen, Pseudo-Airfield (2025). Installation view. / Photo by Tsai Min-Ying.
This May, the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) opened its annual exhibition “WE Are Becoming.” Among the works on display is Apollo Photo Studio Window in Wartime by the Taiwanese photographer Peng Ruey-lin, the first Taiwanese to travel to Japan to study photography. He photographed the display window of his own studio, the “Apollo Photo Studio” (亞圃廬寫場, named after the katakana アポロ, “Apollo”). The Apollo Photo Studio in Dadaocheng was one of the important image-making sites of its day. In 1945, to secure open ground for air defence, the Japanese government planned to demolish the block where the studio stood, and Peng wound up the studio on 10 June; with Japan’s subsequent defeat, the demolition was never carried out. In the photograph, the paper tape on the glass has been shaped into the beams of a searchlight, and model warships have been arranged to stage a scene of naval vessels underway.
As the war advanced, it gradually reshaped the very spaces of image-making. Civil-defence regulations required that street-facing glass be covered with tape or paper in an “X” pattern, so that shattered glass would not injure passers-by. However, Peng applied his tape in the shape of searchlight beams. What is striking is that the searchlight motif on the shop window also reflects the wartime instrumentality of “searching the sky for enemy aircraft,” revealing how the logic of air-defence militarisation had been internalised within civilian life.
The work prompts a question: within what perceptual condition did the producers of such images find themselves during wartime? And did the war leave any trace in postwar artistic production?
Recent contemporary art in Taiwan may offer some clues. From the air-defence details in Peng Ruey-lin’s studio, to Chiu Tzu-Yen’s reconstruction of a ground-based decoy airfield in Pseudo-Airfield, to Huang Tonghong’s juxtaposition of American wartime aerial photographs of Taiwan in Replacement of Time and Space I: Chiayi, 1945, different artists seem to have registered an image-logic that developed under an insufficiently examined wartime influence: how not to be seen by the eye in the sky.
I. Anti-Sky Training on the Ground
Taiwan occupied a peculiar position in the Second World War. As a colony of the Japanese Empire, it served as a logistical base for the Southward Advance. Yet, Taiwanese had very few opportunities to take part in aerial combat as pilots. For most Taiwanese, the experience of air war was in fact a ground-level experience of air defence—the colonial government disciplined Taiwanese bodies into mechanisms for meeting air war from the ground, teaching them how to answer the gaze of the sky from below.
Ground-based air defence operated through three interlocking systems of training. The “alarm system” was the first, an auditory training. It translated visual reconnaissance (aircraft scanning the ground) into acoustic warnings, allowing people to distinguish levels of threat by the sound of the alarm, and shifting the centre of perception from sight toward hearing.
“Blackout” was the second training. So that people would not become targets, every locality was required to extinguish its lights after dark. “Air-defence drills” were the third. After the “Ordinance for the Enforcement of the Air-Defense Law in Taiwan” was promulgated in 1937, air defence shifted from “demonstrative large-scale drills” to a routinised institution: island-wide joint drills, prefectural-level drills, protection-corps exercises in towns and villages, and air-defence training in schools and factories were held year on year, and blackout passed from a drill exercise into a wartime norm. In drills such as those in Taipei in 1931, Keelung in 1933, and the Taiwan Army’s special manoeuvres of 1934, each exercise mobilised above all the bodies of the masses: people moved through conditions of billowing smoke, simulated poison gas, and extinguished lights. Air-defence training did not seek to expand people’s visual capacity; instead, it systematically weakened their reliance on sight and cultivated other bodily senses.
Taiwan, like the Japanese metropole, also held air-defence exhibitions. At the 1943 air-defence exhibition in the Taipei Public Auditorium, anti-aircraft guns, howitzers, and reconnaissance aircraft were displayed. Visitors were led in hands-on drills with an acoustic locator, a device by which, before radar matured during the Second World War, various nations used arrays of giant horns to collect the engine noise of distant enemy aircraft for early air-defence warning. On the nearby canal, concussion and smoke shells were actually fired. Through the display of physical weapons and through live-fire exercises, the exhibition worked directly on the visual senses of the Taiwanese.
Air-defence mobilisation in the Japanese metropole operated on two levels at once: first, a bodily technique of self-concealment, training people to hide in smoke and darkness; and second, visual exhibitions through which people actively internalised the Empire’s language of air war, seeing in air-defence objects “our forces, our sky.”
Yet a similar sensory mechanism does not entail an identical subject position. Colonial Taiwan received the same sensory training, and under Japanese state policy the Kōminka (imperialisation, 皇民化) movement actively demanded that Taiwanese identify themselves as members of the Japanese Empire. But even as their national identification was being transformed, Taiwanese continually registered the ethnic difference between Japan and Taiwan. The presence of this awareness gave the same air-defence training a different perceptual texture among the colonised: to conceal oneself was not merely a tactical technique of air defence, but also a repeated confirmation of one’s own position of existence—within a system that effaced one’s original ethnic identity, learning to make oneself disappear.
II. The Decoy Airfield: Concealment at the Scale of the Landscape
Chiu Tzu-Yen’s Pseudo-Airfield (2025) enlarges this “technique of concealment” to the scale of the landscape. Chiu takes as his subject the decoy airfield at Beigang (北港) and the military ruin of the “blast-resistant transmission station,” a reinforced-concrete underground bunker built in the Japanese colonial period for communications at military airfields, chiefly to protect the facilities that transmitted radio signals outward. At the time, the Japanese military had local artisans use the techniques and materials otherwise employed for temple-festival decorations—cardboard, woven bamboo, iron frames—to build fake warplanes. These decoy aircraft had no capacity to take off or land; their sole purpose was to make American aerial-photograph interpreters believe that a real military base stood here, thereby misleading the force of the bombing.
In the galleries of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the artist built a one-to-one replica of a Zero fighter out of iron frames and cardboard and used the same materials to construct the interior of the blast-resistant transmission station. Filmed within this set, a second video work tells a story in which a child who has strayed into the underground bunker and the artisan who built the decoy plane ride the fake aircraft together, undergoing a fictional aerial battle.
After the battle, the child innocently asks: “Who is the enemy? Who is the ally?”—drawing out Taiwan’s complicated historical and political landscape. The battle scene was shot in a crude green-screen studio, and the story ends in an accidental conflagration: fireworks from a temple celebration ignite the decoy plane, whose structure is exposed and consumed in the flames.
Visitors may choose to sit inside the cockpit and watch, on the screen before them, a film recounting the history of the decoy airfield; or they may sit on the other side, on a masonry-shaped seat that imitates the underground bunker—a seat that is at once a loudspeaker, letting the viewer feel the sonic vibrations of aerial combat while watching the video.
When the viewer sits in the cockpit, they momentarily accept the completeness of the pilot’s viewpoint; but the moment they rise and move to the bunker seat, the “fighter” that had just contained them is revealed as a large exhibit of iron frames and cardboard, and the aerial-combat sound that had been shaking their body turns out to come from nothing more than a speaker inside the seat. This gap makes the viewer realise that the “somatic sense of war” offered by the decoy plane is itself a kind of disguise. And this is precisely the principle of the decoy airfield: it expands the tactic of wartime deception from “how to conceal an individual within smoke” to “turning the surface of the earth into a stage of deception,” disturbing the reconnaissance overhead at the scale of the landscape.
III. When the Aerial Photograph Becomes a Stratum of History
The contemporary photography researcher Huang Tonghong has long centred his work on the reconnaissance aerial photographs left behind by the US military after the war, seeking to re-read the history of the ground from these images that look down on Taiwan from the sky. Both his book Reversing the Eye of War: Reading the Context of Taiwan’s Landscape through Old US Military Aerial Photographs (反轉戰爭之眼：從美軍舊航照解讀台灣地景脈絡) and the project Replacement of Time and Space I: Chiayi, 1945, realised in the 2021 exhibition “A Rhythm of Tree Forming the Fores” at the Chiayi Art Museum, take the uncovering of past military images as method, using the superimposition of old and new aerial photographs to render the changes in Taiwan’s landscape legible once more as local knowledge.
In Replacement of Time and Space I: Chiayi, 1945, nine large black-and-white aerial photographs of Taiwan taken by the US military during the war hang beside a floor-to-ceiling window, so that the actual streetscape of Chiayi outside overlaps with the historical aerial images. American aerial photographs were taken along chosen flight paths, exposed mechanically and continuously at preset intervals; the large-format aerial images people see are, for the most part, composites assembled from many such consecutive frames.
In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, the French philosopher of technology Paul Virilio observed that the development of flight transformed the human way of seeing from focused looking into a geometric, focusless scanning, and that war and cinema share a single perceptual logic, which he called the “logistics of perception.” Modern war does not only take place at the front line; it also organises and manages how the masses “see, perceive, and receive information.” Human perception, like military logistics, is systematically planned, deployed, and dispatched.
The Chiayi Art Museum, where the work was shown, was formerly the Chiayi Branch of the Monopoly Bureau—a building that survived the American bombing of the war. On the label, Huang notes plainly that this is a structure that survived the wartime air raids. At the moment they gaze at the aerial photographs, viewers stand in a place that “once successfully concealed itself.” Through the display of reconnaissance photographs taken before the American raids on Taiwan, the altered landscape, the surviving building, and the visitors are set against one another and layered within a single space, presenting a history of survival in which both people and architecture concealed themselves.
IV. Self-Concealment as the Legacy of a Wartime Perception
The exhibition “WE Are Becoming” seeks to let images that were once silenced speak again, presenting the dissonant voices that neither the colonial nor the wartime narrative of assimilation could absorb. In examining Taiwan’s modern and contemporary art, one finds that some of these dissonant voices do not exist by appearing head-on; they hide instead within the logic of “how not to be seen”—concealment being at once a bodily technique disciplined into being by the colonial government and a means by which the colonised survived within a system that effaced their ethnic identity.
From Peng Ruey-lin to Chiu Tzu-Yen to Huang Tonghong, these three works span eighty years and differ in medium and form, yet together they point to an insufficiently recognised question: does the perceptual logic centred on self-concealment during the Second World War still operate in contemporary society today? The practice of these three artists suggests that it has not disappeared but has been transformed through art into a sediment of collective, complex awareness. Their works, as if by unspoken agreement, let concealment itself become visible, so that the sensory mechanisms that once demanded people vanish from the view above become objects that can, today, be seen and spoken of.
Supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation under the “Phenomenon Writing—Visual Art Criticism” program.
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’.