In Memory of History: Glimpsing the past and future in Taiwan’s contemporary art
Reflections on VR cinema and contemporary performance during Taiwan Week 2025
The news of the Philippines' possible involvement if China invades Taiwan broke out while I was preparing for a trip to Taiwan for the ArtsEquator Fellowship Critics Network. The statement came out of nowhere and yet the alarmist tenor that speaks of the imminent threat of Chinese military presence in Taiwanese waters is hard to shake off. The government and its Manila Economic and Cultural Office (Meco) in Taipei dismissed the pronouncement as nothing new and that it is “business as usual” in Taiwan. As I write this, national disunity post-elections continue to hint at future antagonisms and upheavals.
Bridging distances
My perceived distance from this reality and history of geopolitical tension was slowly bridged as the trip drew nearer. I traveled with Filipino co-fellow and cinephile friend Adrian Mendizabal, a film scholar and archivist. What if this invasion happens during the trip, we joked. It is no laughing matter, obviously, but Pinoy humor can get darkly dismissive as if to ward off bad fate. On our way to the Taoyuan airport train station, the first person we spoke to was Filipino, who overheard us mention our place of residence in Da’an Park. The numbing distance one feels when away in a foreign country was instantly crossed like pressing an elevator button.
And yet this distance also afforded me a certain freedom from precarious time and reality. The next days of learning and exchange made me contemplate my role as a critic and cultural worker in my own arts community, and in a region within the nation. Immersing in a country where there is strong institutional support for arts and arts writing, I also had to make sense of a relational distance, as the experience of Taiwan Week 2025 gave me a series of firsts. I saw my first virtual reality (VR) film (two in fact), and experienced for the first time the thrill of watching contemporary theater and dance, of which none are accessible or prolific in my hometown.
Far from the reality of the absence of spaces and support for these art forms back home, the glimpse of Taiwan’s history through its robust and diverse art scene got me thinking and speaking effusively with co-fellows from Southeast Asia, more so when the celebratory event dedicated to “showcase the creative force” of its artists is a nationally-labeled one.1
Between the surreal and hyperreal
In one of the narrow lanes in Datong District is a building that houses independent film and culture offices, among them the Very Mainstream Studio and Theatre, whose projects that engage with VR technology, are exciting as it is visionary. Chou Tung-yen’s 14-minute VR short film In The Mist (2020) signals our dive into Taiwan’s art landscape, particularly in cinema, one that is far removed from the Philippines in terms of utilizing and incorporating cutting-edge, innovative technologies in film production and exhibition.
In The Mist is a dreamlike excursion into a gay sauna. The spectator assumes the body of a “patron” positioned in corners of various rooms, shifting from observer to the observed. I realized describing VR cinema as dreamlike is a truism. After attaching a head-mounted display or HMD instantly cuts you off from the actual world, you tread the fine line between the surreal and hyperreal. The engagement with the erotic and pornographic became a personal negotiation of shame and vulnerability. What started out as an exercise in voyeurism, ended up as an exploration of queer desire and longing.
Chou, also a playwright, finds VR’s affinity more to theater. But the film combines theatrical staging with the observational rigor of documentary cinema that summoning cinematic terms to describe VR’s distinct immersive quality and visuality is inevitable. Chou, who has made non-VR films before, mentions the Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang, whose slow-cinema aesthetic is palpable here. Using VR’s grammar and lexicon, where engagement is understood through environment, embodiment and engrossment,2 Chou's film successfully imagines the world of the sauna as a fantastical, even haunting, image and experience. There is hardly a plot in In The Mist. Plot, as it is written in cinema, is turned upside down in VR, where agency and control dictates the experience. Cine-VR’s dissolution of the cinematic frame offers you a kind of agency to either look on or look away.
VR has long been heralded as the future of cinema. In a Senses of Cinema feature, Raqi Sayed traces the history of the practice of incorporating VR technology and aesthetic as far back as the 70s with experiments in interactivity, immersion and cinema projection, as well as through works of new media practitioners like Gloriana Davenport—who mentioned the term “movies of the future” when referring to expanded cinema movements—and encourages us to think of VR as a “thread embedded in the elasticity of cinema itself.”3
Paradox of the present
This elasticity might also be applied to the subject of history. In the shows and performances, we find ourselves in current crises that mirror past historical traumas, and in the context of Southeast Asia, shared realities of migration and displacement.
We saw the 30-minute documentary The Man Who Couldn’t Leave by Chen Singing on the last day of the trip. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival’s Immersive Section in 2022. In batches, we proceeded to individual booths, where we virtually inhabited the Green Island prison compound of Taiwan’s martial law period, also known as White Terror, when thousands died and hundred thousand more suffered from incarceration. The film is told in a poetic and epistolary approach inspired by the last words of A-Ching, the film’s deceased protagonist, written in a letter hidden from a shirt’s seams. At the end, an aging survivor named A-Kuen addresses us directly. “After you finish watching, I hope you spread the word.”
By choosing the modality of VR, Singing’s film immerses us into history quite distinctly from the way it has been told in traditional cinema or other media formats. A new, and in a certain context, futurist technology with uncertain archival possibilities acts as a vessel of a historical past. The layers of entrapment in Man, from virtual to temporal, triggers a kind of claustrophobia, for not even freedom from the cinematic frame can guarantee a metaphorical liberty. A paradoxical experience that mirrors the difficulty of coming to terms with the past and cumbersome weight of history.
Bodies of men surround you in The Man Who Couldn’t Leave like in Chou’s film. But instead of the erotic, the body here gestures towards the abject. Art critic Hal Foster writes that in the history of abjection, the corpse is the subject—“the violated body is the evidentiary basis of witnessings to truth, testimonials against power.”4 But Chen’s film creates another paradox. The image of the abject body, seen hanging from hands tied at the back, or as you float past them like an omnipresent spectator, renders a pictorial quality as if in a painting, creating a conflicting sense of appreciation. Beauty passes through the prism of terror and violence. The light illuminates these poetic bodies, these vessels of the soul. They fade into obscurity but we can continue to speak of them into the future. Memory-traces from the past snatched by future technologies with uncertain archival possibilities. In my head, I can hear Walter Benjamin: we may never see it again.
Rapture, resistance, resonances
Chen’s film gestures towards the continuance of time carrying the stories and histories of the theater performances we saw, resonating with each other with similar rapture and rage.
It branches towards Cinderfella, a harrowing story of a gay man caught in the tumultuous tides of Taiwan’s history of becoming and unbecoming. With its tale of repression and historical violence during the White Terror, and through its indefatigable actor playing all 19 roles, it allegorizes the body as a site of labor and trauma, both as vessel of performance and remaindered life. Echoes of hopeful resistance amidst the chaos of modern life are also found in Journey into the Apocalypse, through its audacious and complex, even if at times confusing, reimagination of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, suggesting that the apocalypse seems to always have been a work-in-progress.
Chen’s film is a crucial punctum in the constellation of narratives grounded in Taiwan’s history as shown in the White Terror Memorial Hall, the prison compound now housed Taiwan’s Human Rights Education Center (also credited as producer of Chen’s film). The institution’s existence in the middle of construction in New Taipei City cannot be more poignant—history resisting itself from the sound and fury of modernity. At the museum shop, there are publications in Chinese on display. But a plain one in white paper stood out with the words “Never Again” on the cover. It instantly transported me to the Philippines’ fraught history of Martial Law, with the rise to power of another Marcos and a present generation swayed by disinformation and divisive socio-politics. After all, resurrected regimes of terror need to be creatively combated by the universal language of resistance.
Just like the performances and VR films we saw, Taiwan's performance, exhibition, and overall creative spaces evoke tradition and futurity in form and imagination, weaving the past and present into these locations of artistic locutions. Ideas thrive, intersections explored, and possible futures continue to be mapped. We listened to artists’ pitches that presented a diverse picture of modern Taiwan rooted in tradition through hybrid art projects that combine sound, dance, performance, and even live cinema. At the Observers’ Forum we engaged with Taiwanese critics and art professionals, whose supportive ecosystem is one we Southeast Asians could only dream of. And yet also through the inspired sharing of my co-fellows’ work, it impressed upon us the inextricability of the critic-writer-cultural worker in these ecosystems.
As the trip drew to a close, I go back to the rapturous contemporary dance performances we saw: Bare Feet Dance Theatre’s Lingering (shown here in its 45-minute version), a reinterpretation of Javanese traditional dance with its allusions to the sea and Asian spirituality, and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s Sounding Light, with its hypnotic, ritualistic mimicry of the natural world that builds up into a visceral and exciting climax. Both performances are like artistic playgrounds that sound off an urgency but also invite contemplation. The movements mimic birth, death and rebirth; dispersal and coalescing. A metaphor to the tension, intersectionality and precariousness of contemporary art that provides an impetus for critical and collaborative creation. To reference Pina Bauch’s oft-quoted phrase: dance—make art, write—otherwise we are lost. #
The ArtsEquator Fellowship Critics Network is made possible with the support of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia.
Excerpt from the message of Liu Yi-ruu, General and Artistic Director. Taiwan Week 2025 Catalogue. 2025
Matt Love, Carrie Love and Eric R. Williams. Virtual Reality Cinema: Narrative Tips and Techniques. (India: Routledge, 2021)
Raqi Syed. ‘Total Cinema: Or What is VR?”. Senses of Cinema. March 2019. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2019/feature-articles/total-cinema-or-what-is-vr/
Hal Foster. Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. (London: Verso, 2015)