Image credit: Li Li-chung, The Memo of Formosa Air Battle. Photo by Tsai Min-ying.
In this special issue, art critic Tsai Min-Ying invites readers to reconsider Taiwan’s experience of World War II aerial warfare through contemporary art, shifting attention from battles in the sky to the infrastructures, senses, bodies, and memories shaped on the ground. “Ash and Sugar,” published as two parts, traces how colonial agriculture, sugar refining, labour, and fuel production sustained Japanese military aviation, while works by Hsu Chia-Wei and Lo Yi-Chun expose histories omitted from dominant narratives. “Evading the Eye in the Sky” examines air-defence drills, camouflage, decoy airfields, and aerial photography to show how wartime survival cultivated a lasting logic of self-concealment. The last piece, “Two Bird’s-Eye Views,” compares Taiwanese and Japanese artistic perspectives on aerial war, using pigeons and bats to unsettle the authority of the military gaze and contrast colonial and imperial memory. The articles show how art can recover suppressed histories, challenge visual regimes of war, and reveal aerial warfare as a material, perceptual, and political experience across generations today.
Ash and Sugar: A Material History of Taiwan’s Aerial-Warfare Logistics Base Part I. Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Ash and Sugar: A Material History of Taiwan’s Aerial-Warfare Logistics Base Part II. Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Evading the Eye in the Sky: Beginning from the Window of a Wartime Photo Studio. Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Two Bird’s-Eye Views: The Historical Interstices of WWII in Contemporary Taiwanese and Japanese Art. Written by Tsai Min-Ying.
Are Taiwanese Technologies Eco-friendly? Written by Maytapat Pararaman.
Becoming “Taiwanist”Written by Wen-chi Li.
Taiwan’s Austronesian Diplomacy: The Taitung National Museum of Prehistory as an Actor of Museum-Indigenous Diplomacy Written by Simon Delpeuch