Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Image credit: Li Li-chung, The Memo of Formosa Air Battle. / Photo by the author.
Taiwan, an island situated in a complex geopolitical position, has long been shrouded in the shadow and legacy of war. From serving as a base for the Japanese Empire’s southward advance during the colonial period, to becoming the first island chain of the anti-communist bloc during the Cold War, and on to the present-day tensions across the Taiwan Strait, war seems never truly to have left the island of Taiwan.
Contemporary artists have responded acutely to the theme of war. The Taiwanese artist Li Li-chung (李立中) and the Japanese artist Kota Takeuchi (竹內公太) each explore the experience of WWII from different vantage points: one focuses on the memory of the US bombing of Taiwan, the other revisits the history of Japan’s bombing of the United States. Reading their two video works side by side reveals how artists from Taiwan and Japan each remember and reflect on war, forming a contrast between a “colonial view” and an “imperial view” in their differing concerns about aerial warfare.
By juxtaposing the two works, this article reflects on what it means for contemporary art to revisit, or even reconstruct, the memory of aerial warfare. How does the experience of war shape the formal choices of visual art, and in turn shape what kind of historical perception and understanding these works produce in contemporary audiences?
I. Differing Memories of Aerial Warfare: Empire and Colony
The Taiwanese artist Li Li-chung’s video work The Memo of Formosa Air Battle (2020) (台灣空戰記事) and its sequel, Night Flight-The Memo of Formosa Air Battle (2021) (夜間飛行) use the aerial gaze of pigeons to imagine the impact of bombing and the experience of aerial combat when US forces raided the land of Taiwan in 1944. As a colony of Japan, Taiwan became an important logistical base for the empire’s southward-advance policy during WWII, supplying large quantities of materiel, food, and labour and building airfields, radar stations, communication posts, and other key military installations. It played a crucial strategic role in the Pacific theatre and therefore became a priority target for Allied air raids. For the people of Taiwan, WWII was not only a colonial war into which they were forcibly drawn but also their first collective and traumatic experience of modern warfare, especially air raids.
What the Memo of Formosa Air Battle series presents is precisely the colonial experience suppressed beneath the imperial history of aerial warfare. Pigeons are not by nature nocturnal birds; they must undergo special training to carry out missions at night. Likewise, Taiwanese youth aircraft workers (臺灣少年工, Kōza Shōnenkō) who never had aerial experiences were forced to undergo training, giving their youth and their lives to a war that was not their own. This “unfair/unnatural” condition—human beings and animals forcibly transformed into instruments of war—is itself the most concrete manifestation of colonial violence. The art critic Nobuo Takamori (高森信男), writing on Li’s works, notes that the video of the Memo of Formosa Air Battle “develops, in the form of a prewar Shōwa-era propaganda poster, a beast-like image fusing man and pigeon; the beast on the screen is at once a living organism and a weapon of war,” revealing the dehumanising process of wartime mobilisation. Through historical and field research, Li responds to the aerial history of WWII from the ground-level perspective of colonial Taiwan, restoring the suffering figures of humans and animals that mainstream narratives had left out.
That same year, the Japanese artist Kota Takeuchi’s video work Blind Bombing, Filmed by a Bat (2020) used echolocation to simulate the ultrasonic positioning of bats and was filmed with a drone to simulate a bat’s field of vision in flight, revisiting the historical traces of Japan’s wartime bombing of the United States by means of trans-Pacific balloons.
Between 1944 and 1945, the Japanese military manufactured nearly ten thousand balloon bombs (風船爆弾, fūsen bakudan) to bomb the west coast of the United States. However, because a hydrogen balloon could not be steered once aloft and relied entirely on high-altitude air currents to carry it, of the ten thousand balloons only about nine hundred successfully crossed the Pacific, and roughly three hundred reached American soil. Under the US government’s strict news blackout, the Japanese military operation caused no mass panic. It ultimately killed only six civilians, a pregnant woman and five children who died after touching a fallen balloon bomb in Oregon. This seemingly absurd weapons program reflects the desperation and blindness of Japanese militarism in the closing stages of the war: lacking any effective long-range bombing capacity, it sought to create psychological terror with imprecise, uncontrollable balloon bombs. In the end no more than a futile imperial phantom.
II. The Nonhuman View of Flying Animals: Simulating the Bodily Experience of War
Both artists chose to reconstruct the history of war through the gaze of animals, and this choice of perspective is itself deeply critical. For Li Li-chung, the pigeon’s view is both a concrete historical presence and a symbolic gaze. Carrier pigeons were real participants in the wartime logistics system. Looking down from high altitude upon the colonial land being bombed, this gaze presents a “suspended perspective” that is neither perpetrator nor victim, compelling the viewer to perceive the ambiguity and complexity of that history anew. Nobuo Takamori further notes that Li fuses the flight of pigeons with the flight of humans through “a very classical technique,” which “may be the artist’s own romantic imagination, or may be read as a cautionary fable of humanity’s history of aerial warfare.” This man-pigeon beast is at once a living creature and a weapon, and its ambiguity is precisely a metaphor for the colonial condition: mobilised by the empire yet not belonging to it, participating in war with one’s body yet powerless to determine the war’s direction.
Conversely, Kota Takeuchi is concerned with the absurdity of the Japanese military’s blind release of balloon bombs. In pursuit of victory or revenge, human beings adopt an extremely inaccurate strategy for large-scale bombing, as though taking part in a war while completely unable to see. As he states in an interview: The bombs’ flight was left entirely to the whim of the wind; there was no way to aim directly at a target at all. The work uses aerial drone footage to simulate a bat’s perspective, drawing on the concept of echolocation as a metaphor for this “blind” logic of war. Although bats have weak eyesight, they can fly accurately by relying on a precise ultrasonic positioning system; the balloon bombs, however, lacked even this capacity for “positioning.” They were utterly blind, uncontrollable, absurd weapons. Through the bat’s gaze, the artist re-enacts this trajectory, satirising the blind flight of the balloon bombs of that time.
Yet the “nonhuman view” is not a neutral formal choice; on this point the two artists in fact move toward different ethical positions, a difference that merits closer distinction.
Li Li-chung leads the viewer into the body of a pigeon—a body that was conscripted, unaccustomed to night flight, and pressed into the service of a war that was not its own. The politics of this perspective lie in this: it invites the viewer to experience aerial warfare from the perceptual position of a colonial victim, rather than from the omniscient, god’s-eye view of a bomber pilot, thereby summoning the viewer’s emotional resonance.
By contrast, Kota Takeuchi’s formal choice is more self-critical. The bat’s view is not a heroic sacrifice but a fundamental “inability to see clearly.” His choice to simulate flight through echolocation rather than sight corresponds precisely to the absurd essence of balloon bombs that could not be aimed at all. This correspondence between form and content makes the work’s critical force more restrained and precise—it does not summon emotional identification; it summons a mockery of imperial reason.
Moreover, both works take the “bird’s-eye view” as their central perspective. The bird’s-eye view is not merely a way of seeing; it is a perceptual legacy of military technology. In War and Cinema, Paul Virilio observes that the nature of modern warfare has shifted from the forcible seizure of material territory to the exertion of pressure and deterrence at the level of perception: the bomber looks down on the ground from high altitude, commanding information and calculating targets, while those on the ground can only flee an unseen threat. This asymmetrical visual relationship is itself a form of violence—not bodily violence, but perceptual violence. The bird’s-eye view manufactures an illusion of omniscience; Caren Kaplan, in turn, points out that this “omniscience” is in fact a visual simplification and monopoly: it allows the party commanding the aerial gaze to reduce the complex life of the earth’s surface to calculable targets.
III. Conclusion: Art as the Reconstruction of the Historical Archive and Its Contemporary Echoes
Through the aerial view of animals, the two artists, on the one hand, use art to reflect on the cruelty of war, generating the resistant momentum of antiwar discourse; on the other hand, they raise a self-aware question about the writing of history: when mainstream historical narratives so often serve nation-building and political legitimacy, can art offer the possibility of another kind of historical narrative? That possibility lies not in providing a “more truthful” history but in revealing the plurality and openness of historical narration, and the voices of the suppressed. The two works also challenge, by different routes, the question of “who is entitled to write history”: Li Li-chung uses the unofficial memory of a colonial victim to patch the empire’s grand narrative, while Kota Takeuchi sets out from the imperial perspective to confront and critique his own nation’s wartime violence. This self-reflection, each artist turning toward their own history, precisely constitutes a possible space of dialogue between contemporary Taiwanese and Japanese art.
It is worth pondering that the current political situation of Taiwan bears a striking resemblance to that of the WWII period. Owing to its complex geopolitical position and its role as a critical link in the global semiconductor supply chain, this island has drawn unprecedented international attention, becoming a stage on which the powers contend. Cross-strait tensions, the possibility of regional military conflict, and Taiwan’s predicament amid great-power rivalry all cause the spectre of war once again to hang over the island. To revisit the memory of the aerial warfare of WWII at such a historical moment is not merely to look back on the past but to sound a warning for the present and the future.
Art cannot prevent war from happening, but art can preserve memory, awaken reflection, and challenge dominant narratives. When we re-examine the aerial violence of WWII through the eyes of pigeons and bats, we see not only the cruelty of history but also how human beings become alienated in violence and lose their humanity in fear. Such seeing may become a faint but necessary force for resisting future violence. With their nonhuman views, the two artists remind us to reconsider what humanity, what civilisation, and what war truly are, and whether we still have the chance to choose a different future.
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’.