list of Presenters and abstracts

The representation of a vulgar masculinity, “taike,” has been recently noticed in studies of Taiwanese popular music, and its significance in shaping a new Taiwanese popular culture has been analyzed in a wide range. While most researchers take a critical cultural studies perspective to examine this newly-evolving expression and style as the emergence of a local pride, few of them questions the overwhelmingly heterosexual male perspective in imagining, creating, and promoting the taike culture and Taiwanese national identity. Thus, this paper aims to bring the feminine side of the taike culture into discussion—the gendered term “taimei,” referring to the female subject equivalent of taike, offers alternative forms to understand identity politics and gender representations in Taiwan.

Two rap songs entitled “Spicy Taiwanese Sister” (la taimei) are selected as the main analytical artifacts in this study. MJ116’s version was created in 2017, in which the general taimei imagery was portrayed inferior to the male and under the masculine gaze. On the other hand, Dawgie’s version was created in 2019, immediately after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen responded to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s New Year speech concerning the issue of sovereignty. Tsai, the female President, was eulogized by Dawgie as a “spicy Taiwanese sister” for her resolute attitude towards Xi’s proposal of a one-country-two-systems plan. In this context, the meaning of the term taimei has been appropriated from a derogatory female form of address, to a piquant female character (la taimei), and to a political “camp” that secures democracy and safety for Taiwan (la taipai). How has the discourse surrounded by the “spicy Taiwanese sister” been changed? How has this development of femininity in the taike culture influenced identity politics in Taiwan? I will answer the above questions by analyzing the two songs as well as a collection of reports, comments, and memes in major media outlets in Taiwan in 2019. The results will enrich the ongoing discussion about how gender intersects with other dimensions of identity in Taiwan.

It is an anomaly that a lifeless puppet can bleed and die. How can crafty techniques of puppeteering mediate with filmmaking technologies and create a new cinematic genre? This new genre is not easily classified based on traditional boundaries, such as the conventional ideas of a puppet show or puppet animation, as it is something in-between. Focusing on Pili puppetry, a popular Taiwanese TV series that depicts martial arts-based narrative, this article examines how the productions adopt traditional glove puppetry but interestingly mediate the bloody fight and death scenes through the camera movement, computer-generated image (CGI) animation, and the use of special effects and material products (e.g. fake blood). The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expand the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.

Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affects the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry. Blending the visual analysis with the artists’ interview, this article articulates the show’s theoretical argument and artistic practice to explain how the form transverses traditional boundaries. The critical investigation on the form representing bleeding puppets also explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of anomalous media forms proliferate anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.

In Taiwan, abortion rituals (Yingling chaodu 嬰靈超渡, Yingling gongyan 嬰靈供養) represent attempts to appease or rescue Yingling (fetus spirits 嬰靈), who are the spirits of fetuses that have died from abortions or miscarriages. Within most contemporary religious discourse, Yingling are believed to wander in the world of the living or the world of the dead, and longing for the care of their parents. Yingling is a new category of ghosts generated within modernity in Taiwan. Over the last decades, the term Yingling has been gaining visibility in media outlets. In his studies of abortion ritual published in 2001, Marc L. Moskowitz presents six portrayals of fetus ghosts: beneficent fetus ghosts, location-associated fetus ghosts, malevolent fetus ghosts, fetus ghosts that harm without intent, pitiful fetus ghost, and anxiety-related fetus ghosts (Moskowitz 2001, 58-63). Moreover, he stresses that the images of the Yingling are highly shaped by the intentions of the content creators (Moskowitz 2001, 93). The emergence of social media over the last decade thus evokes a crucial question: does the democratization of media accessibility generate new images of Yingling? Moreover, do the new images alter popular attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and parent-child relationship? Through the methodology of content analysis, this paper examines the representation of Yingling conveyed by PPT (the most popular Bulletin Board System in Taiwan) as well as the uses and interpretations of the term Yingling by netizens. The examination shows how the idea of Yingling has been gradually embedded in the linguistic context in Taiwan. In this context, Yingling serves as a rich metaphor of the struggles of women and men in the complexity of modernization.

Hentai is a term with several meanings, such as “strange”, “abnormal”, “queer” or “queerness”, the latter two used specifically in the shôjo texts by Osaki Midori (specifically in Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense [Kawasaki 2008]). It can also mean “metamorphosis” (McLelland 2006), for example as seen in the book パーフェクト・ブ ルー 完全変態 (Perfect Blue: Kanzen Hentai, “Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis”) by Takeuchi Yoshikazu. Recently the term is employed to mean “strange” or “perverse” in Japan; however, outside of Japan, it specifically refers to a form of animated pornography made (exclusively) in Japan, popular amongst both men and women. In the pornographic sense, hentai is a “type of erotica frequently characterized by detailed, unusual and fantastic depictions of sexual activity habitually intended for sexual arousal” (Ortega-Brena 2008); it covers a wide array of plots, from schoolgirls, to tentacle monsters. Hentai remains controversial both inside and outside of Japan (Josephy-Hernández 2017), making it imperative to analyse the role hentai plays in the dissemination of specific gender and social values, and the role that official (e.g. publishing houses) and unofficial (e.g. fansubbers) distributions play in it. Thanks to unofficial, fan translations (e.g. fansubbing, scanlations and hacktranslations) fans outside of Japan can obtain hentai material that is legal and easily purchasable in Japan, but illegal, and banned, outside of it. This material refers to lolicon and shotacon (animated or drawn pornography involving sex with female and male minors, respectively). Fansubbers, scanlators and hacktranslators act as translation agents whose role is not only to distribute these fan translations, but also to catalogue and to act as repositories of all the material. This talk presents a study of the evolution of the term hentai, and ponders on the ethical aspects involved in the consumption of material “pornographic pseudo-images” (Ost 2009), and the legal and ethical implications of the translation and distribution of lolicon and shotacon outside of Japan.

Media polices the development of children’s sexuality and guides their socialization. In this globalizing world, dissemination of media across cultural lines necessarily complicates this process. Cardcaptor Sakura, an internationally popular shojo manga series created by the four woman group CLAMP, performs this task in unconventional ways. I use Cardcaptor Sakura to explore how the American official adaptation repurposes themes of the original shojo manga content in a way that contradicts this genre as a historically women-driven, subversive space for the exploration of marginalized identities. This series follows the titular elementary school girl who discovers her innate powers when she unwittingly unseals a magical book of cards that she must then recapture. The Japanese animation studio Madhouse released the original anime adaptation in 1998, and the American TV network Kids’ WB then broadcast an edited and censored version in 2000 for American audiences.

The American adaptation masculinizes Sakura’s identity by emphasizing her role as Cardcaptor, whilst removing critical portrayals of her platonic and romantic interactions with significant characters, both male and female. The resulting absence highlights how the original Japanese series constructs an idea of a female audience’s gaze that focuses on themes of love, friendship, and constructions of happiness as they are conveyed through Sakura’s interpersonal relationships. The original Japanese anime further socializes its young target audience by portraying Sakura as a liminal figure who constantly straddles the border between the “realistic” and the “supernatural"; her struggle to balance her magical and non-magical experiences and responsibilities parallels her progress from girlhood into adolescence. As media from disparate cultural milieus propagate across sociocultural perspectives, investigating how the visual aesthetics and values portrayed in one context translate into another can help clarify the nature of cultural hybridization and the construction of identities that occur within these hybridized spaces in media.

This presentation focuses on the representation of late-modern Japan by the extremely popular, all-female musical theater Takarazuka Revue, as displayed in two recent performances: Le Chateau de la Reine (2017, sky troupe) and Company (2018, moon troupe). The dramaturgic decision to tackle the problematic of late-modern Japan on Takarazuka Revue’s stage is an important one: firstly, it is a clear distancing from the postwar performance strategy to not ever represent Asian peoples or nations in modern or contemporary times due to Takarazuka Revue’s infamous involvement before and during the war; secondly, it is a powerful ideological return to its founder Kobayashi Ichizô’s ideal of a theater for the people and in the name of the people, which has gradually vanished since the overwhelming success of the blockbuster The Rose of Versailles (1974) with its numerous sequels and their orchestration of the world as a flowery rococo fantasy with gorgeous costumes, rapid succession of astonishing stage-sceneries and flamboyant advertisement of otokoyaku (female impersonators of male roles in Takarazuka Revue).

Backed by extensive fieldwork and meticulous archive research, this paper analyses the inner-dialectics of the theatrical medium “Takarazuka Revue” as an instrument of reflecting, promoting, propagating, implementing, and thus providing alternative role-models and existential paradigms within the neo-liberal undercurrents crisscrossing Japan’s public discourse in 2017 and 2018. Regardless if it tackles the experiences of a group of Japanese tourists in Paris or everyday lifestyles in Tokyo, Takarazuka Revue’s re-creation of “Japan”, “Japanese citizens” or “Japaneseness” strongly adheres to the idea of “unity within diversity”: namely, tolerance and preservation of the status-quo. The analysis unfolds on two levels: the narrative construction of a “Japan of variety and self-acceptance”, visible in the performances themselves, and the meta-narrative level referring to Takarazuka Revue as a public institution within the complex apparatus which is the Japanese media industry, e.g., in the employment of the sky troupe for the performances with progressive contents to test the openness and resilience of audiences, as it happened in previous performances since 2007, as well.

This project is one of the first attempts to explore the transpacific history of the Japanese all-female theatrical company, the Takarazuka Revue (called Takarazuka) as a way to explore cultural encounters between Japan and Hawaii. Although there are still very few academic works on Takarazuka’s postwar tour in America, previous scholars only paid attention to the mainland American tour, and neglects to pay attention to the Hawaii tour in the 1950s. Furthermore, those scholars commonly treat Takarazuka female performers as subjugated and voiceless and do not pay attention what they said about the tour.

Drawing on transnational theory, which allows us to focus more on actors who challenged, reinforced and negotiated the constructions and unmaking of nation-sates, in this research, I treat these female performers as active subjects while considering the historical and political background surrounding the pacific during the cold war era. By performing as the cultural representatives of Japanese women and interacting with various raced peoples, such as Japanese Americans, White American travelers and Native Hawaiians, I argue that these female performers used the Hawaiian tour to reshape and redefine their own identities, particularly through the modern dilemma of negotiating national boundaries. In turn, I hope to show how their transnational perspectives helped to clarify an emerging possibility of a cosmopolitanism that could likewise serve the continuous imperial and nationalistic interest of Japan even after the war defeat.

Furthermore, I argue that the location of Hawaii was important to investigate further because Hawaii shared exoticism between both Japan and the U.S. and shows us a unique picture of the Takarazuka females’ understandings that are completely different from mainland America especially in the late 1950s.

Two Taiwan-based filmmakers, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, have each made films in Tokyo in which they filmed (without a permit) on the JR train lines. Hou’s Café Lumière (2003) was commissioned by Shochiku studios to celebrate the centenary of Ozu Yasujiro’s birth, and Hou explains in the making-of documentary Métro Lumière that if he had been unable to film on the train, he would not have been able to make his film. This suggests the importance of trains in Ozu’s work, Hou’s cinematic homage to Ozu, and Hou’s representation of everyday life and cultural identity in contemporary Tokyo. Queer filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s “post-retirement” short film No No Sleep (2015) is shot in the Ikebukuro neighborhood and includes footage on the JR Yamanote line (as well as a sauna and capsule hotel). No No Sleep is the seventh installment in the “Walker” series of international site-specific, exhibition/platform-specific collaborations with Tsai’s muse Lee Kang-sheng dressed as a Buddhist monk walking at a snail’s pace, based on the 16^th century Chinese story of the Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang’s legendary pilgrimage to India. Here, however, Lee is paired with Japanese actor Ando Masanobu. By comparing these two films by Hou and Tsai (and interviews with the filmmakers), we consider the post-colonial resonance of Japan and Japanese cinema in the work of contemporary Taiwan filmmakers, their critical approaches to everyday life and the politics of identity in contemporary Tokyo, and the significance of trains in their films (signifying modernity, [post-]colonialism, interconnection, speed, and relative motion).

Since cross-strait co-production film Kung Fu Dunk succeeded at the box office, seeking cooperation opportunities with China become the most important market strategy of Taiwan film industry. Taiwanese film started incorporate the actor/actress from China, simplify Chinese characters and scenes combined with Taiwan and China. Besides, the Golden Horse Awards which be known as the most important film festival of Chinese-language Cinema was caught up in by the cross-strait political issue. At the same time, more and more cross-strait actors/actresses stated the political identity of Taiwan is a part of China. This thesis talks about how young Taiwanese audiences feel while Taiwanese film “invaded” by China.

This thesis interview 20 young Taiwanese who have experiences of watching cross-strait co-production film and grown-up after Taiwan became a democracy country. This study specifically discusses four cross-strait co-production film, The Stolen Years, At Café 6, The Mysteries Family and Didi's Dream, and the political debates of the Golden Horse Awards as well as the political identity of cross-strait actor/actress. The interviewers could be divided into three groups: first group is whose work relative to the film industry, the second group is the audiences who enjoy China’s drama and film, and the third one is who prefer other types of the movie including Hollywood, Japanese and Korean.

This study reveals that an individual has multiple characters, such as an audience has its political ideology. How Taiwanese audiences negotiate their identity while watching the cross-strait co-production film? What is the connection between cultural identity and national identity?

Although the interviewers were all grown up in Taiwan’s post-martial law, democracy era, they still have different interpretations about the cross-strait co-production film and the political issue in the film festival. This phenomenon indicates cultural identity, cultural capital and experiences of interact with China bring huge impact. For those Taiwanese audiences who enjoy China’s drama, apparently, they have more tolerance for Taiwanese film mixed with China’s culture and the China-bound career migration of Taiwanese actors and actresses. For those audiences who pay attention to movies, they are more critical of how politics influence movies. For those audiences who prefer Hollywood, Japanese, Korean movie, they demonstrate stronger nationalistic sentiments while watching the film mixed cross-strait culture and a non-negotiable attitude of national identity.

Wei Te-Sheng is a household name in Taiwan due to his iconic films. The common theme in his films is Taiwan’s own identity and historical perspectives that are independent from China. Although the official name of Taiwan is the Republic of China, the majority Taiwanese nowadays find themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Wei is an influential opinion leader whose voice is widely heard, supported and respected by a large proportion of the Taiwanese general public.

After releasing the most watched Taiwanese film Cape No. 7 (2008), which delivers an audience-pleasing experience by referencing a romance between a Japanese male teacher and his female Taiwanese student in colonial Taiwan, Wei subsequently produces Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011), and Kano (2014). Based on true stories, Wei provides a view of “bad Japan” in Warriors of the Rainbow, and the opposing “good Japan” in Kano. In the former, Wei criticises the arrogant attitudes of the Japanese officials that caused the 1930 Musha Incident, by giving a sharp distinction of heroes and villains; we, the Taiwanese, are heroes fighting against the Japanese villains. Whereas in the latter, Wei presents romantic Orient of Japanese colonisation by presenting a harmonious friendship between the Japanese, Chinese and Indigenous Taiwanese students when they came the second in the 1931 Japanese national high school baseball championship. Despite Wei’s conflicting messages about Japanese colonisation, his film philosophy is still clear. The Japanese colonisation cannot be described merely as good or bad, rather it needs to be examined in its complexity of nuanced lived experience.

This paper explores how films in the 1960s represent ethnic conflicts in Taiwan by analyzing Mandarin and Taiwanese-language bilingual films made by first-generation mainlander directors who migrated to Taiwan after the end of WWII. In the 1960s, some mainlander directors made Mandarin and Taiwanese-language bilingual films that explore the ethnic conflicts between Mainlanders and native Taiwanese in postwar Taiwan, such as Yi shih yi jia (宜室宜家, 1961), Liang siang hao (兩相好, 1962), Longshansih jhih lian (龍山寺之戀, 1962), Jieh tou siang wei (街頭巷尾, 1963), etc. Although the theme about ethnic conflicts was heavy, these filmmakers used comedy to tackle these difficult issues. Moreover, in order to make different ethnic audiences understand the dialogue in these movies, producers add Mandarin subtitles, a lingua franca in postwar Taiwan, on them. In fact, before the 1970s, most films in Taiwan were catered to mainlander audience only or native Taiwanese audience only but never for both ethnic groups. However, Mandarin and Taiwanese-language bilingual films in the 1960s intended to bridge the gap between mainlanders and native Taiwanese. Despite their importance, these works’ representation of ethnic issues has rarely been explored. Until now, when discussing the ethnic identities and ethnic conflicts in the postwar, martial law era, the works of Taiwanese New Wave in the 1980s have been the main subject of research, such as A City of Sadness (1989), Banana Paradise (1989), A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and so on. By exploring films from the 1960s, this project will examine why and how the first-generation mainlander filmmakers portrayed ethnic identities and ethnic conflicts through movies and how they (intended to) promote deep understanding of the changing identities in post-war Taiwan.

This paper considers how the contemporary children’s literature represents the collective memories of Taiwan by analyzing Xing Jiahui’s works. Xing Jiahui passed away at the aged of 46 because of cancer in October, 2019. It was just after she received the Golden Tripod Award, which is the highest honor in Taiwan’s publishing industry, in August, 2019. She had portrayed Taiwanese political issues such as White Terror, environmental problem and human rights in her children’s literature. Children’s literature in Taiwan had played an important role in creating the national identity as disciplined “Chinese” during the martial law era since 1949. However, the democratization movement in 1980s Taiwan stimulated some Taiwanese writers to produce the children’s literature that imply a Taiwanese identity, which is distinct from the KMT imposed “Chinese” identity.

In addition, before the KMT government lifted Martial Law in 1987, the environmental movement was considered a direct threat to the government. Many environmental protesters overlapped with supporters of the democratic movement. Thus, Taiwan’s environmentalism played an important role in its democratic transition. In this circumstance, many Taiwanese writers started to create “children’s literature for the Taiwanese, by the Taiwanese and of the Taiwanese.” They came up with the idea to create their “imaginary hometown” and presented the awareness of eco-cosmopolitanism to the new generation of Taiwanese citizens, the children. This paper examines two literary works by Xingn Jiahui: “Playing the Violin for the Hope,” which is the story about the White Terror’s victims and “Wabi and Sabi,” which is the story about the conflict between Science and Ecology. In doing so, it considers how the contemporary Taiwanese writer looks back to the collective past of Taiwan and tries to present the collective memories and Taiwan as an imagined hometown with the awareness of eco-criticism to Taiwanese children.

This project examines the popular narratives about catastrophe in Taiwan and Hong Kong during the first decades of the 21^st century. In creating narratives about large-scale man-made and natural disasters, creators and filmmakers often intend to answer burning questions about the present by drawing on their relationships with the past and the future. Sometimes they intend to stop the clock towards an imaginary catastrophic future, such as in the short film “Un(ordinary) Happiness” (2012) by Taiwan film director Cheng Yu-Chieh, in which a woman returns to her radiation-polluted home after a massive nuclear crisis (in a fictive future) and remembers her happy family life before the nuclear plant malfunction. In other cases, popular culture creators aim to resist the present by rewinding, slowing down, or resetting the clock, such as in the music video “May Glory to Hong Kong” (2019) by Hong Kong protesters during the months-long Anti-Extradition Law protests.

In both examples, gas mask, worn by people entering the evacuation zone in “Un(ordinary) Happiness” and by the orchestra members in “May Glory to Hong Kong, ” becomes a conspicuous visual object that elicits a whole range of affects—horror, anger, rage, anxiety, hopelessness, self-sacrifice, pride, etc. Gas mask, thus, serves as an inconvenient reminder of the violence and destruction to, but also protection of not only human’s body but also the Anthropocene time. Through the visual trope of gas mask in these texts, Taiwan and Hong Kong popular culture creators reevaluate their relationships with the environment and the authority in times of crisis—in both cases, these crises are deemed political, and try to answer the questions such as what is meant to be a glocal subject in the Sinophone societies.

Arguably, the case of Ms Jin Xing probably is the best touchstone of analysing multiculturalism in Chinese popular culture today. Until late last 2017, she used to be a popular TV talk show and reality show hostess in Shanghai Oriental TV Station and Zhejiang Satellite TV Station. She also boasts as a verified influential Chinese social media (weibo) user with more than thirteen million followers. Her fascinating life experience readily evokes some critical issues in examining the notion of multiculturalism in contemporary East Asian society, which possesses a strong influence of traditional Confucianism values and intersected with the fast growth of modernity and cosmopolitanism. Firstly, she is a transgendered modern dancer. Born in 1967 as a baby boy, he turned himself as a female at the age of 28 in 1995 through physical surgery in a hospital in Beijing. At the time, she was already an internationally acclaimed artist in modern dance. Hence, she was seen as an icon of Chinese LGBT group and seemingly a feminist advocate. Secondly, she (Korean name: Kim Song) came from a family of both parents being ethnic Koreans in north-eastern China, with her mother even nationally being a Korean citizen. As a Chinese TV and online celebrity today, she has always been caught up in the complicated scrutinization of public opinions concerning the ethnic identities between the mainstream Han audience and her Korean minority ethnicity, as well as nationalities between Chinese and her home group of Koreans (particularly South Koreans). Lastly, she has two both transnational marriages, with one Caucasian American ex-wife in the US during his dancing study overseas before her transgender surgery, and currently with one Caucasian German husband with three adopted Chinese children after her surgery.

Seeing the concept of multiculturalism in a broader spectrum, the author adopts Jin Xing as a unique case to examine Chinese middle-class’ perceptions of multiculturalism from several key aspects: gender, ethnicity and cultural differences. The data is drawn from, primarily, online posts designated to Jin Xing’s themes on Zhihu (Chinese version of Quora), as well as numerous Chinese and western media reports on Jin Xing in recent years. The paper intends to unfold the politics of “differences” embedded in the Jin Xing phenomenon in China nowadays, in which her legendary life experience has been interwoven with her outspoken TV talk shows and social media, the polarized audience groups as well as Chinese state media authorities. The implication on the proposition of “multiculturalism with Asian characteristics” also is discussed at the end of this paper.

Japanese kawaii has a global presence, but is especially popular in East Asia. When and how did this aesthetic rise to prominence, and what makes it so amenable to crossing boundaries: national, cultural and even gendered? This paper examines kawaii from a historical and comparative perspective to explore the origins of this aesthetic pre and post modernity and examine its influence on gendered identity formations. I argue that as the kawaii aesthetic broadened and gained influence in Japan it began to shape the identity of Japanese women and later, men. The gendered development of kawaii has implications for the rest of the world as this eminently sharable aesthetic gains popularity and influence outside its country of origin.

Kawaii has occupied a place in the Japanese aesthetic landscape since the Heian era (794-1186), and developed further in the Edo era (1603-1868). At the beginning of the twentieth century when modernity began to transform Japanese women’s identity, kawaii incorporated Western cultural influences to reflect their desires and dreams. Though the structural changes necessary for gender equality remained elusive as the century progressed, kawaii culture evolved to offered girls and women a way of self-fashioning outside rigid social expectations. In the 1970s, the failure of the student protest movement drew more and more young men to the kawaii aesthetic as a way of resisting social norms regulating masculinity. This trend accelerated in the 1990s after the bubble economy collapsed.

Like American cute, kawaii is often assumed to be a top-down commodity aesthetic driven by corporate profit. Yet recently various transnational, bottom-up subcultures and practices have arisen that continue the work of exploring alternative gendered identities initiated by kawaii culture in Japan. This paper concludes by considering examples of new communities that deploy this aesthetic to promote inclusivity and support marginalized voices.

In this paper, I examine the novel Dancing Alone (《獨舞》), written by Tokyo- based Taiwanese author, Li Kotomi/Li Qinfeng (李琴峰). The novel was published in Japanese in 2017 and self-translated into Chinese in 2019. I read the female protagonist’s tragic experience as an exaggerated and condensed complaint for social injustice to lesbian identity. While the protagonist remains depressed throughout the novel, she manages to perform a decent façade in public. This performance therefore produces a stark-contrasting divide between her internal life and her public self-presentation. I examine what elements constitute this façade of normalcy , which other characters refer as “the mask of social elite,” and argue that this decent façade has much to do with the notion of “respectability” which, in Dancing Alone, is marked by transnational mobility, literary taste, higher education, urbanity and interestingly, a set of progressive performance of being a lesbian. With the notion of “respectability” being put into practice and maintained, however, the protagonist finds it even harder to articulate her lesbian identity, which is ensnarled in her own social negativity. This unbridgeable gap between respectable façade and lesbian identity suggests that once the lesbian identity is associated with social negativity, it is very difficult to disassociate it from negativity due to the stigmatization of lesbian identity. This stigmatization is not only exerted by other characters on the protagonist but also exerted by the protagonist herself. I contend that the protagonist’s unresolved homophobic complex is a caution against the general stigma of LGBT identity, rather than just reproducing homophobic logic.

This paper contrasts contemporary focuses on instruction-based ‘representation’ in the media with the anti-instructional potential that pervades Japanese and US media environments. While popular US media discourse often stresses the importance of queer youth being able to ‘see themselves’ in the media, and mocks or condemns forms of representation that are not explicitly ‘identifiable’ as LGBT, the non-representational queer media trend of cute aesthetics represents a challenge to that framework. The prevalence of cuteness in Japanese and US queer communities suggests a politically viable form of ‘seeing yourself’ that dances around and through the strictures of explicit representation.

This paper examines transnational youth-oriented resources that deploy cute aesthetics, including English-language LGBT educational materials and marketing for queer events in Japan. Resources often use de-sexualized ‘cute’ characters that are widely associated with female and Asian identities, but often appear to be (and/or are stated to be) without gender or race. In many of the very spaces that extol identity-based diverse media representation, the utilization of de-gendered and de-racialized characters suggests a negotiation of that belief: non-representative characters have begun to function as a proxy for fully inclusive representation. Inclusivity is created through a refusal of specificity, with cute characters operating as identificatory vehicles precisely because of their lack of explicit representation. That mixed identification sits uneasily alongside representation-focused rhetoric that claims its impossibility. These examples suggest that in some contexts, the evasion of explicit media representation allows for subversion of both the emotionally regulatory contemporary media discourse around representation and the oppressive standards that discourse works to dismantle—while still retaining its consumerist synergy.

Aldous Huxley once wrote, “After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Composer Ifukube Akira, perhaps best known for his work on the Godzilla franchise, would surely have agreed, as he wrote scores throughout the 1950s for films that portrayed the sorrow of the Second World War from the Japanese perspective. Many filmmakers emphasized the suffering of the Japanese people as a result of war, but they did not do so in order to forget Japan’s role in the war. Rather, they sought to ensure that Cold War political interests, e.g. the Japan-U.S. alliance, did not overwrite the memory of the human cost of the war. For Ifukube, who agreed with Dmitri Shostakovich who said, “There can be no music without ideology,” film scoring provided a medium for both cultural and political activism.

This paper argues that Ifukube, inspired by a close study of the music and politics of Soviet composers, such as Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, composed scores for war-themed films in the 1950s to amplify political messages that challenged the status quo and provided a cultural working-through of the trauma of war. Ifukube and many other composers tapped their film scores to carry the heavy weight of memory for many groups of people who experienced the sorrow of war in different ways, including the residents of Hiroshima, soldiers in Burma, and repatriates from the Soviet Union.

The Genbaku bungaku (A-bomb literature) is a unique genre of literature that regroups writers and artists of several media, most of whom are also hibakusha (bomb survivor) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In spite of the seminal ways in which they represented the victims, one particular figure emerged in the press in 1955: “the Hiroshima Maidens” - a group of twenty-five young women who had been disfigured by the bomb and who were sent to the US in order to get reconstructive surgery. One of the reasons for this initiative was that the girls would never have been able to find a husband if disfigured, leaving the many disfigured boys and men in the shadow of the atomic mushroom. This gender divide strangely re-emerged after Fukushima, when music composer Otomo Yoshihide remembered that some of the rumors after the accident was that Fukushima women were unmarriageable because radiation would have cause sterility. Here too, men were left in the shadow of the exploding power plant. Not only this, but as art historian Hayashi Michio explained, most of the victims represented in the media were the “normal”Japanese and heterosexual families. Foreigners and homosexuals were left invisible. This echoes the difficulties for Korean and other foreign hibakusa to gain any visibility after the bombings.

Scanning artistic, popular and journalistic material, this paper will first investigate the persistence of gendering of the victims and perpetrators, but also of the atom and radioactivity (in particular in Cold War sci-fi movies). On the other hand, it will look at the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the representation of nuclear traumas and how these binaries persist in our contemporary times.

The collapse of the Japanese economic bubble in the mid-1990s caused a number of “bubbles” in Japanese society to burst. Destroyed was the arrogance of Japan as the world’s wealthiest and most advanced nation. Crushed were the ideas of universal middle-class affluence for all Japanese. And gone was the comfort of lifetime employment, steady income, and economic security. In their place were left economic stagnation, a shrinking and aging population, and a general sense of malaise and depression known first as the Lost Decade, and now Decades. Once celebrated as Japan’s “corporate warriors,” the successful white-collar salaryman upon whose backs Japanese postwar lifestyles had been constructed ceded his position in popular consciousness to his younger, less ambitious, and less hardworking offspring: the Furita, NEET, and hikikomori. Social commentators bemoaned the emasculation of Japanese males, termed “herbivorous” for lacking in vigor as compared to their go-getter female siblings, the “carnivorous woman,” and decried the declining birth and marriage rates as ominous signs of Japan’s lost virility. In this social context, conservative cultural producers, such as Ishihara Shintarō, Hyakuta Naoki, and Satō Junya, resurrected the memory of the kamikaze to rescue Japan from social crises.

This paper reviews Japanese war films from the Lost Decades -- namely, Men of the Yamato (2005), For Those We Love (2007), and The Eternal Zero (2013) -- to show how Japanese cultural producers reimagined the history of the Kamikaze to revivify young Japanese men for the sake of the nation. In doing so, these films not only recast and romanticized the kamikaze as sanctified virgin sacrifices who died for the salvation and rebirth of Japan, they reasserted martial masculinity as the only solution to Japan’s perceived crisis of masculinity and resulting threats to the safety and security of the nation, both in the past and in the present.

Documentary film LOVE BOAT: TAIWAN (dir. Valerie Soe, 2019, 63 min.)

film screener link: https://vimeo.com/327528799

password: taiwan

After the United Nations expelled Taiwan and recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1971, Taiwan’s government sought to increase global support through other means, including an unusual program that at its height sponsored about 1200 Taiwanese American college students each summer to spend six weeks in Taiwan. Although the program included classes in Mandarin-language study, martial arts, and brush painting, its popularity stemmed from another source: as an excellent place for college-aged Taiwanese Americans to find romance. Because of this, although it did not take on a ship, the program is more commonly known by its nickname – the Taiwan Love Boat.

In the documentary film LOVE BOAT: TAIWAN I utilize pop music to explore identity formation and cultural transmission in the Taiwanese diaspora. In this way the film explores what sociologist Diana L. Wolf terms “emotional transnationalism,” or cultural connections to their home country that immigrants pass on to their children and grandchildren. Wolf states, “children of immigrants (who) maintain these ties at the very least, at the level of emotions, ideologies, and cultural code (enact) an emotional transnationalism that situates them between different generational and locational points of reference, both the real and imagined—their parents, sometimes their grandparents and other relatives—and their own.” From 今天不回家 (Not Coming Home Tonight) by 1970s Taiwanese chanteuse 姚苏蓉 Yao Su Rong to Taiwanese American singer 陶喆 David Tao’s 普通朋友 (Ordinary Friend) to 羅志祥 Show Luo’s 2006 nightclub classic 精舞門 (Dance Gate), LOVE BOAT: TAIWAN examines the significant music that formed the soundtrack to the Love Boat experience and how that music encourages emotional transnationalism among the Taiwanese diaspora.

From 1930s Hollywood ‘voodoo’ films to bestselling mobile apps, zombies have permeated virtually every layer of popular culture, not only in the West but on a global scale, making them arguably the most successful fictional monsters of all time. Scholars have explored the significance of this worldwide phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, leading to the emergence of an interdisciplinary field known as ‘Zombie Studies’. In terms of zombie film output, Japan is perhaps the world’s second largest after the US and above the UK. Yet it remains vastly ignored by academia. Having sourced and verified an exhaustive catalogue of over 160 feature length Japanese zombie films produced between 1959 and 2018 and through recent field work in Japan, including personal interviews with local film, media and folklorics scholars and professionals, we are now able to construct a clearer overview of this uncharted corpus. This paper will present some of the most predominant cultural specificities of Japanese zombie films and their unparalleled narrative and stylistic heterogeneity. Against previous assertions which confined these films to a ‘cult’ sub-genre, restricting the Japanese monsters they featured to mere Western imports, this paper will demonstrate instead that Japanese cinematic zombies defy simple categorisation and repeatedly challenge some of the key posits at the centre of Zombie Studies, especially regarding origins and defining characteristics. Japanese folklore and literary tradition in particular provides a new lens through which these popular fictional ‘Others’ can be (re)examined, uncovering new significance and offering new insights into both Japanese and Western cultures.

South Korean features have long depicted dramatic and subtle changes in the political landscape. This is reflected in numerous trends such as films dealing with the precarious relationship with Japan (Assassination, The Age of Shadows), the geopolitical climate between the two Koreas (Shiri, Ashfall) and domestic politics. This paper focuses on the latter and more specifically the year leading up to and following Moon Jae-in’s presidential election victory in 2017. It was a fascinating time for the local film industry that was reeling from Park Geun-hye’s oppressive policies that stifled creativity with studios encouraged to produce conservative leaning films including Ode to My Father and Operation Chromite. As a corruption scandal involving Park’s former confidante Choi Soon-sil came to light that ultimately brought down her administration, the industry responded robustly. Political documentaries Spy Nation and Moo-hyun, Tale of Two Cities that could not have been released six months earlier turned into box office hits. Similarly, Our President about the late president Roh Moo-hyun that was released two weeks after Moon Jae-in was elected became one of the most successful documentaries in history. Commercially, A Taxi Driver and 1987 were part of this progressive trend. What these films have in common, however, is not only their high budgets and star pedigree but how they mirrored events in the then present when millions spilled out onto the streets to oust former president Park Geun-hye. This paper argues that these films are part of a collective voice in a determination to bring about political and social change ushering in an era of thematic concerns that were largely prohibited under previous conservative administrations. But what is also striking is the pace at which these films were produced and released.

This article aims to study supernatural stories from six episodes of Folklore, a television series, including A Mother's Love, Tatami, Nobody, Pob, Toyol and Mongdal, which broadcasted on HBO Asia. It also aims to analyze identity politics and commodification that appeared on the Folklore series as an Asian entertainment industry. Found these results, the supernatural episodes shows that they can be categorized into 6 different types of ghosts: 1) Wewe Gombel (kidnapping ghost in Indonesia), 2) Zashiki Warashi (child ghost in Japan), 3) Pontianak (female vampiric ghost in Singapore), 4) Phii Pob (murderous ghost in Thailand), 5) Toyol (infant ghost in Malaysia), and 6) Mongdal (unmarried ghost in South Korea). Furthermore, they also represented identity politics about women in motherhood and wifehood, women as victims of sexual harassment, and construction workers as diaspora in the international labour markets through the role of main characters and their dialogues. In conclusion, the supernatural and marginalized people stories, which appeared on Folklore series altogether, were essential elements that made up stories of filmmaking. In other words, they were commodified for the Asian entertainment industry.

Taiwan horror film series called “The Tag- Along”(紅衣小女孩) with three episodes came to the top of box office from 2015-2018. This series formed an ingenious cinema genre: “Taiwan Moo-Sin-A Universe” (魔神仔宇宙), which inspired from Taiwanese folklore or urban legends. Its success stirred this small-scale market and brought some new direction and pattern to the Taiwan filmmakers. Moreover, rising from the popular culture studies, these films can be read in many other ways. I found it created an alternative way of narrative such like using stars to participate, which tradition is scarce in Taiwan at least, and adopting uncertain story mixed with Taiwan local mysterious rites. The investigation first from cultural, exotic, folkloric elements reveals both the collective unconscious and contemporary anxieties in this society; in the same time, I also examined the horror elements to clarify or demonstrate how the genre produced and developed.

Previous research shows the big thematic image in the series are the “horrific mother” and the “female monster”, which ironically are oppressed by the patriarchal society as the “monstrous-feminine” (Creed, 1993). In addition, similarly, the main purpose of this paper is to emphasize the children in the films. Sometimes they’re demonized, while victimized. After all, they‘re seen as others in this society, which means they’re not truly being. This is an intriguing struggle in the artistic representation of daily horror. So, I took the perspective from new childhood sociology studies to revisit the childhood in this film, which involved with the power relationship between children and adult. I coined the term ‘adult gaze’ to analyze this series. Finally, it would explain some different or antiquated values in Taiwan society, which may need to be challenged and transformed.

Reader: Alan Glyn Jones (glynbey@yahoo.com)

Abstract available soon

This paper investigates Taiwan Females’ consumption practices of Kimono dress-up experience in Japan, in order to explore how they (re)write self-identities by becoming one-day ‘Japanese’. The discussion particularly focuses on how Japaneseness is (re)presented in contemporary Taiwan consumer society, and the dialectical relationship between the postcolonial and the consumerist, the spiritual and the material, and the global and the local.

In 2015, a survey conducted by the Embassies of Japan in various Southeast Asian countries revealed an interesting result, that most Southeast Asian countries viewed Japan favorably. This is quite peculiar despite the fact that most of the countries had terrible World War II experiences with Japan, compounded by the period wherein these countries are commemorating 70 years of the end of the war. This created a boom in referring to Nye’s Soft Power and McGray’s “Cool Japan” to explain the phenomena. However, a close examination of the policies highlight that with the exception of Singapore, none of the Southeast Asian countries were targeted by such policies.

Thus, despite no direct efforts from Japan, Southeast Asia still consumed and included Japanese cultural icons into their own cultural landscape. This paper presents the various forms of such hybrid interpretations which not only reflect the influence of Japan, but also how Japan may be absent, yet present within the cultural landscape of Southeast Asia.

Japan's cultural policy and cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Japan’s popular culture has been massively disseminated and consumed throughout Vietnam. These cultural products not only introduce a multitude of consumption options, but also have an impact on the way urban consumers imagine and think about Japan. This paper examines the extent to which the special symbols of popular culture can change the perception of Vietnamese about an island nation. Based on questionnaire surveys conducted with several age groups such as children, university students, staffs and faculty from Ha Noi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh, it focuses on the appreciation shown to significant symbols and how it shapes Japan’s image of Vietnamese. The central argument presented is that exposure to Japanese popular culture disseminates new, favorable images, which modify the way the country is perceived from history to present. Based on that, the study shows more clearly the successes and restriction of Japanese cultural dissemination policy as well as draws conclusion and suggestion for future research.

‘Eiga Sai’ is the Japanese Film Festival in the Philippines, which has been annually organised by the Japan Foundation since 1997. It remains the most popular cultural event of the organisation, and continues to garner more viewers and expand to farther reaches of the Philippines as the years have gone by. The Japan Foundation considerably utilises film in the promotion of cultural exchange beyond the Philippine context as well, as the institution consistently holds overseas Japanese film screenings and film festivals in multiple hosting countries. Film festival diplomacy has been an under-documented yet steadily prevailing conduit of soft power in host countries that is neither obscure nor unique to Japan. To address the research gap on film festival diplomacy operation as well as the cultural gap of Japanese soft power manifestations in the Philippines, this study will frame the Japan Foundation’s utilisation of Eiga Sai as tool for cultural diplomacy in the Philippines. This case study will study Eiga Sai as 1) a case of film festival diplomacy (a form of cultural diplomacy) 2) a conduit of soft power in the Philippines, and 3) an avenue of relational identity construction and projection. This research is concerned with how Japan recognises and uses film to continue to bolster its image and presence in the Philippines and further, achieve its national interests there. Additionally, this research aims to deconstruct what kind of Japanese identity is being projected to the Philippines through the film festival programming process. The major research questions of this study are as follows: 1) How does Japan conduct cultural diplomacy through Eiga Sai? 2) How does Japan further national interests through the film festival diplomacy? and 2) How has a Japanese identity been constructed and projected in the Philippines through the film festival programming of Eiga Sai? In order to answer these questions, primary data is gathered through a combination of purposive key informant interviews with Japan Foundation representatives and a quantitative and qualitative content and thematic analysis of the film festival programmes of Eiga Sai from its start in 1997 until its most recent showing in 2019 is deployed. This primary data is compared with the secondary data such as the Japan Foundation policies and orientations and MOFA official diplomatic statements, among other sources that enshrine Japan’s diplomatic identity.

This study explores “Satoko to Nada” an essay manga by Yupechika as an intercultural site (Gudykunst & Kim, 2003) through which discourse on hijab wearing Muslim woman can be traced. Topic of religion and visualization of its elements are still viewed as complex matter that demand sensitivity from authors and publishers. Studies show problematic side of having graphic representation of hijab, i.e. Islamic veil and how the women who wear them continue to entice discussions (Duncan 2015; Whitlock 2006). Essay Manga genre is argued to be suitable media to deliver taxing issues; framed in daily life settings and enlivened from author’s personal experiences, the so-called taboo topics are posited with humor which appeal naturally to readers’ logic (Sugawa-Shimada 2011). Social identities however, influence the way we interpret messages (Martin& Nakayama 2017), thus how readers as decoders give meanings to symbols and narratives in a popular culture are beyond the encoders’ control.

Yupechika’s essay manga offers stories about two roommates: Satoko who is a Japanese and Nada, a Saudi Arabian Muslim who are both attend a university in USA. It is the first Japanese manga that present a Muslim woman as a main character. Depictions of modern women who are busy navigating university duties with playtime and prayer time, as well as managing fashion and food restrictions offer fresh perspectives against stereotypes of the Muslim world’s and image of Middle East “homogeneous other” (Madella 2013). Findings from Japanese readers’ social media posts however, present variety of notions which again argue that essay manga as a pleasurable popular product is inevitably political, particularly when it is addressing representation of a certain cultural group and enforcing stereotype of otherness. Endorsing posts along with concerns and critiques are as expected, but comments that suggest the work as exotic oriental experience are more prominent.

Since most of the indigenous singer-songwriters with cultural intentions perform themselves through social media, they communicate culture to other people. As an online community platform, social media has a function of interpersonal communication to the contemporary indigenous music community. Moreover, the indigenous music became a dialogue field between musicians and listeners, from which it could be heard that the consultations between indigenous peoples and other groups in Taiwan during each period.

For the Internet surfer, social media are a way to link the content with indigenous music randomly. However, for indigenous musicians and their fans, they are a necessary tool for communicating their culture and identity with each other. This paper discusses the social media use of indigenous musicians in Taiwan. To address the issue of the process through which the Taiwanese indigenous musicians communicate culture, music and identity with and to their audiences, this research is eager to escape the framework of the “pan-indigenous ethnic group” to explore the ways in which contemporary Taiwanese musicians communicate their identities through music and to represent themselves online.

While examining the genre on the profile of different indigenous musicians on Facebook, the terms that the indigenous musicians choose to provide a perspective of categorizing indigenous music, for example, the folk music, fusion, and world music. Nevertheless, to capture the reasoning behind Indigenous music is arduous as the process of Indigenous music is literally embodied within the indigenous knowledge and identity.

New media development affected the routes of Taiwanese indigenous music that are obviously layered and messy (Tan, 2017: 48). As much as researchers tackle to categorize indigenous music, it is not easy to find a definition. However, it is essential to reflect on the contemporary meaning of the controversy between tradition and modernity (Hoefnagels and Diamond, 2012: 12) that the dialogue provides a space for rethinking the identity of being indigenous musicians in Taiwan. Therefore, defining indigenous music by the Taiwanese indigenous musicians at present is introductory for comprehending the relation between indigenous music culture and identity in Taiwan.

In recent years, more cultural products in Taiwan are designed with the history, cultural, and social and political issues of Taiwan, aiming at “telling our/Taiwanese stories. Some of such cultural products are designed through the popular creation approach called “Moe personification (萌擬人化)”. Moe anthropomorphism is one of the popular creative approaches in contemporary Japanese popular culture, which non-human beings and objects are turned into cute, humanlike, big-eyed anime characters. By using this approach, Taiwan’s cities, counties, local specialties, street foods, schools, and mountains are personified as cute anime girls and boys in Taiwanese ACG production. In a sense, it is the continuation of Taiwanization(本土化 bentuhua) movement. These Taiwanese anthropomorphized products are used to popularize serious issues or knowledge or to help advertise Taiwanese governmental organizations or to promote local tourism.

The use of personified anime characters by the Taiwanese artists, activists and local governments seems like a simple, straightforward case of “branding” - using popular, cute characters to attract a certain generation —the young people, and make serious political issues and the unbeknown information more relatable and accessible. However, considering the complicated sentiment of Taiwanese toward Japan and the interweaving history of Taiwan and Japan, the marker of “Japan” could be political, ideological and national. Whereas the previous criticism on Japanomania phenomenon and comic in the early 2000s, how does Taiwanese now, in the 2010s, view the “Japaneseness” in these Taiwanese moe anthropomorphized products which aim at “telling Taiwan’s story”? Which images of Japan as a marker being accepted to involve in the construction of Taiwanese cultural subjectivity in this era,? By taking the Taiwanese moe anthropomorphized products as the case, this paper tries to conduct a follow-up study of the 1990s-2000s Japanomania in Taiwan in this era. I argue that the Japaneseness works as the value-adding because the young Taiwanese are accustomed with and favor the Japanese popular cultural products no later than the 1990s.

Syaman Rapongan (1957) grows up on the Orchid Island until the end of the 70s. At that time Tao people’s lifestyle is still based on traditional rituals and activities, relying on fishing and agriculture for sustenance. As a teenager he moves to Taidong for attending high school and his departure is seen as a betrayal. In 1988 a deposit of radioactive waste is built on the Orchid Island; Syaman decides to go back and participate in the protests: this “return” is the starting point of his writing career. Whereas moving to Taiwan had meant giving up his people’s values for conquering a (presumably) open-minded view of the world, this return leads him back to the origins, via the re-appropriation of Tao traditional legends, daemon stories, rituals and fishing skills. The Mythology of Badai Bay (1992), his first publication, is a collection of traditional tales representing a record of his tribe’s value system, but also a double attempt (1) to translate his mother culture for Chinese readers to approach it, and (2) to witness the changes of his tribe’s living environment and relationship with nature – thus, their negotiation between tradition and modernity, between their (ab)original perspective and an acquired/acquirable Chinese identity –, providing a peripheral viewpoint on the sociocultural and socioenvironmental transformations which have been affecting Taiwan from the 70s until today. Besides presenting a summary of his literary works and his contribution to video productions such as Voices from the Orchid Island and The Seafarer, this paper aims at analyzing the narrative and linguistic devices employed by the author as to achieve the above-mentioned goals. Moreover, it discusses the topics of negotiated identity and reciprocal legitimization, both on a social level (among tradition, environment and social belonging), and on a literary one (between this Tao-but-sinicized author and his sinophone readership).

A history of mentalities concerns the ways of thinking that persist for an extended period. This study considers the Sunflower Movement, an occupation of Taiwan’s congress (the Legislative Yuan) and its surrounding streets for weeks in Spring 2014, as a window to observe the political mentalities in contemporary Taiwan. Although the movement was portrayed as a youth-led one and opened a new political era, this study concerns its connections to the past. The popular protest artefacts, such as posters, prints, slogans, objects, graffiti, handwritten messages, etc. show that protesters mobilized the historical repertoire formed in the Kuomintang (KMT) regime (1945-2000). However, the mobilization naturally de-contextualized original symbols and appropriate them to express their appeals against pro-China policies of Ma Ying-jeou’s KMT administration (2008-2016). For example, protesters appropriated Sun Yat-sen, a highly respected Chinese revolutionist in KMT’s official history, to justify the protest against Taiwan’s ruling government, arguing it was as righteous as Sun Yat-sen’s revolutions against the Qing dynasty. The May Fourth Movement in 1919 China was also quoted to justify the student-led movement. Moreover, protesters treasured the use of traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan, and the choice to retain the traditional ones was a political decision in the 1950s. Protesters also borrowed a patriotic slogan from the martial law period (1949-1987) and recontextualized it as a patriotic slogan to Taiwan. Last but not least, protesters’ condemnation of Ma Ying-jeou not only criticized his qualification of leadership but also adopted a pejorative attitude toward homosexuality and effeminacy. All these attitudes attested in the Sunflower protest art can find their roots in the KMT regime. Historical analysis to them describes how the mentalities from KMT’s authoritarian regime persist into today’s democratic Taiwan, and how Taiwanese people negotiate with political and historical heritage, such as “Chineseness”, inherited in this island nation.

What are the remaining objects from Sunflower Movement that would help bear the memory of the movement? What stories would these objects tell the future generations, and how?

We begin by looking into the “Bowel Flower Trash Talk Forum” which took place right after the leading activists announced the occupation would come to an end. For many protesters, this foretold vacuation was an anti-climate. The activist Indie DaDee planned and hosted the Forum so that all protesters would have a public, direct, and liberal space to express and exchange frustration and displeasure. “Bowel Flower” is a wordplay on “Sunflower”. The Forum would let anyone publicly mock the occupation and the entire Movement. Foul language would be explicitly encouraged.

The Forum was participatory and vocal; people called/messaged in, and they queued up on site to speak/curse. It was streamed live. A communal sense of presence looped across the online and physical space at once in real-time. Lin Fei-fan, a charismatic activist, even came out to complain about the people who had brought in sunflowers (“they ruined the aesthetics of this Movement”). It would not be a surprise if he was watching the Forum live elsewhere before deciding to emerge and mend relations. The Forum is a novel act in collaborative marking a unique moment of the Movement (occupation ending but not in closure). Its significance drawn not from the fact that Lin came out for trash talks. Rather, it was because this phenomenal gathering of the people at the peripheral could well be what the protesters would remember of the occupation. The people in the core of the Movement too wanted to be seen and be documented together.

Reminiscent objects now exist as Internet memes, live-streamed videos, collaborative documents, and in other digital forms. Collecting, preserving, and interpreting these intangible objects in a sensible context demands investment and persistence in research and policy. These are the challenges faced by research and memory institutions nowadays.

The establishment of archival and exhibiting platforms is not just an act of preserving collective memory or display of identity and solidarity, but also a stage on which various actors can form their own discourses and narratives through both traditional and creative means that can connect with everyday life. While the role of archival and exhibiting institutions and their relations to civil society and social change remain undermined, these platforms play important functions in shaping identity discourse and the cultural and political imagination of society. This research traces the trajectory of archiving and curating social movements in Taiwan. Using the concept of “archiving and curating as activism”, it will analyse the role, the extent of popular agency and civic action in moulding a sense of collective identity in contemporary Taiwan societies. Three cases will be examined, “New Bloom Magazine”, “Student Activism” and “Oppression and Overcoming: Social Movements in Post-War Taiwan” exhibition, to express the broader civil efforts aimed at preserving the Sunflower Movement as well as other selective contemporary social movements in Taiwan. Inclusive of both physical collection and digital archives, this paper discusses the role that public archives and museums can take on when committed to responding to contemporary social issues. Through examining the strategies of collecting, archiving and curating social movements and its history, this research argues that archival platforms and museums can play critical and unique roles in tragic circumstances, which became significant due to their timely and sensitive responses.

The 2014 Sunflower Movement has had broad implications for Taiwanese politics. It has encouraged a wide range of actors to participate in political processes, has shifted the power-relations between the established political parties, and has led to the founding of a new party. These outcomes are tied to the movement’s creative use of digital technologies. But considering how such technologies are themselves governed by certain media logics, the rationales of the political economy, and the design choices of platform providers, how should we assess the role of such technologies in crucial political processes? To explore these issues, this talk examines the connections between participatory politics in Taiwan’s networked society and the use of digital technology. It provides findings from a six-month research project, funded through a Taiwan Fellowship from February to July 2019, that asked: how did the legacies of the Sunflower Movement and its activities, in particular its digital practices, shape Taiwan’s democratic politics five years on? The study consists of interviews with activists and established political actors in Taiwan, and it illustrates how, at a time where many societies around the world grapple with the risks of digitally accelerated politics, Taiwan remains a crucial case for understanding what a digital democracy could look like, what challenges democratic projects face, and what steps different stakeholders take in order to make their understandings of democracy a reality.

In recent years, social movements in Hong Kong have led to a scene in which a form of ‘self-other’ relationship exists between Hong Kong youth and young people living in mainland China. This conflictual type of relationship is manifested in debates between these two groups on popular social media platforms. In this study, I will explore how these two groups construct their political identities in these online debates. To be specific, I will use a critical discourse analytical approach to examine the discursive construction of Chinese young people’s identity of ‘Chineseness’ and Hong Kong youth’s localist and anti-China identity on social media.

I mainly collect data from four popular social media platforms, namely Twitter, Facebook, Weibo and WeChat. Twitter and Facebook are mainly used to collect opinions from Hong Kong young people and some overseas students from mainland China, while Weibo and WeChat are mainly used for obtaining mainland Chinese youth’s ideas.

In this study, I argue that the emerging Hong Kong youth’s localist and anti-China identity mainly draws on hopes for democracy and nostalgia of British colonial period, and is preoccupied with opposing a perceived cultural invasion of mainland China as the ‘other’. It also shows that aspects pertaining to resistance, depression, and fear represent significant discursive elements of this self-identity. In terms of the ‘Chineseness’ of young people in mainland China, it shows that Chinese youth tend to build a patriotic image by emphasising Chinese history and the fast-growing economy, as well as the authoritarian aspects in liberal contexts.

Hip-hop, in the context of cultural imperialism, was disseminated worldwide from New York, influencing numerous people in different ways. Having participated in Taiwan’s hip-hop community for several years, the homogeneity of this community of predominately young, urban, and middle-class males is a main concern of mine. In regards to the developmental process of cultural industry, the capitalists and their middle-class followers exercise control over discourse. Hip-hop in Taiwan has been transformed into a lifestyle for those with sufficient cultural capital and the definition of “real hip-hop” has become the most popular point of debate; artists readily categorized into “old-school” and mainstream camps. However, both camps are trapped by formalism, and the actual conditions of Taiwan’s society and its position in the international division of cultural labor are consequently obscured by issues of perceived authenticity. Considering these problems, I attempt to find a new response beyond this field of conflict by reintroducing the original resistant spirit of the hip-hop social movement. I thus focus my concern on the problems of my hometown, Keelung City. Keelung is located on Taiwan’s north coast and is home to the largest international harbor in Taiwan, linking the island’s capital-area to the world, especially during the industrial era. According to statistics, Keelung has the highest rate of drug-related crimes, suicide, and commuting labor. As a hip-hop activist and scholar, I began organizing local youths and co-founded the Keelung Hip-hop Association in 2016. We attempt to use hip-hop to unite similar actors and create a platform for seeking and exchanging resources, with which we hope to improve the local environment for artists and empower local youths involved in changing the city. In addition, we have held several activities for connecting different actors while enriching the local knowledge of hip-hop’s art forms.

This paper explores the interactions between private individuals, interest-related groups, government entities, and non-governmental organizations in the running of small-business coffeehouses within an urban community in Northeast China. While current studies primarily regard coffee drinking in China as ‘an adoration for Western culture’ and a symbol of ‘Xiaozi’ lifestyle, an investigation of the daily operation and civic activities in coffeehouses reveals a reoccurring connection between public places and the Habermasian ‘public sphere’.

Found often in small-business coffeehouses are ‘interest-related groups’, consisted of people with various social strata yet sharing common interests, especially in various forms of art as Xiangsheng, photography, and folk music. Such groups, mostly amateurs, may perform regularly in certain stages in cafes, effectively breaking the ‘distinction’ in ‘judgment of taste’ as per Bourdieu. Also in the case of the cafe ‘Cats’ Utopia’, whose owner attracts customers with a cat-and-charity theme, money for helping stray-cats is collected via regular charity bazaars in cooperation with animal welfare NGOs. There are also coffeehouses involved in creative industry. Cafe owners co-organized with local government annually a ‘Creative Fair’ as a cultural event where people from interest-related groups may perform and hand-made articles are promoted and sold for commercial interest as well as charity donation, effectively bringing the public sphere to street-level.

Some works, including Ray Oldenburg’s the Great Good Places, examines the informal public life in hangout places and the importance of such ‘third places’ in rebuilding the community life in a tendency toward isolation in American culture. This paper argues that coffeehouses are more than venues for informal public activities, instead, they contribute largely to formal public life as well. People not only talk but also act: they act literally by putting up performances, by charity work in helping stray animals, and by collective cooperation and confrontation with the local government.