Japan – Taiwan Insight

Two Bird’s-Eye Views: The Historical Interstices of WWII in Contemporary Taiwanese and Japanese Art

7 September 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Tsai Min-Ying. This article puts Taiwanese artist Li Li-chung and Japanese artist Kota Takeuchi in dialogue through their representations of WWII aerial warfare. The author reads their two video works side by side, revealing how artists from Taiwan and Japan each remember and reflect on war, contrasting a colonial view with an imperial view in their differing concerns about aerial warfare and challenging dominant historical narratives. Their nonhuman perspectives expose war’s perceptual violence while demonstrating art’s power to preserve memory and resist future violence.

Evading the Eye in the Sky: Beginning from the Window of a Wartime Photo Studio

4 September 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Tsai Min-Ying. This article examines how wartime air defence shaped Taiwan’s visual culture through a logic of self-concealment. The author traces works by Peng Ruey-lin, Chiu Tzu-Yen, and Huang Tonghong. She argues that colonial practices of hiding from aerial surveillance persist in contemporary art as a collective memory of war, survival, and identity.

Ash and Sugar: A Material History of Taiwan’s Aerial-Warfare Logistics Base Part II

3 September 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Tsai Min-Ying. Following its first part, this article 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.

Ash and Sugar: A Material History of Taiwan’s Aerial-Warfare Logistics Base Part I

2 September 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Tsai Min-Ying. This article reframes Taiwan’s World War II air-war experience through the material logistics that sustained Japanese aviation. Tracing sugarcane, molasses, alcohol, and fuel production alongside works by Hsu Chia-Wei and Lo Yi-Chun, the author explores how aerial warfare was materially organised, remembered, and inscribed across Taiwan’s industrial and agricultural landscape.

Expressing Emotions in a Colonial Text: Huang Fengzi’s Taiwan no shōjo (A Young Girl of Taiwan)

25 August 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Anne Sokolsky. This article examines Taiwan no shōjo (1944), a collection of essays by Taiwanese writer Huang Fengzi, arguing that its emotional language reveals the complexities of colonial identity under Japanese rule. Through an analysis of competing voices and affective expressions, it explores how emotions, power, and cultural belonging shaped both the text and its colonial context.

An Old Book of Taiwan Studies: On Leo T.S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

19 May 2026 Chee-Hann Wu

Written by Yu-Han Huang. Reflecting on formative undergraduate experiences, the author traces how studying Japanese colonial Taiwan and reading Leo Ching’s Becoming “Japanese” shaped his academic path. Ching’s analysis of colonial identity formation, despite criticisms, offered a framework to understand Taiwan’s complex identity and revealed how colonial legacies continue to influence Taiwanese self-consciousness.

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