The Taiwan Studies Arts and Culture Program : a CulturalFest Sponsor
Guest post from our friends at the Taiwan Studies program:
“The Taiwan Studies Program at the University of Washington (UW) may sound familiar to people with research interests in relation to the island nation, but what you might not know is that this academic program now has a twin—the UW Taiwan Studies Arts & Culture Program. In addition to the research and education activities on Taiwan society that has been hosted and promoted by the Program in the past, the nascent Arts & Culture Program, designed and directed by Ellen Y. Chang, the first director of the Arts Program, curates and showcases Taiwan arts and culture by linking Taiwan artists and cultural organizations to American cultural institutions, as well as amplifying and propagating exhibits, performances, and events through in-person and online programming.
As a newly established project and the first in the field of Taiwan Studies, one of the Arts & Culture Program’s initiatives is to re-envision the forms and modes of artistic and cultural exchanges. It all begins with an expansive view of what constitutes art and culture. For the Arts Program, it encompasses both formal expressions—museum exhibits, cinema, literature, music and dance troupes—as well as folk crafts, cuisine, local architecture, and material culture, contemporary and historical. For a population of 23 million, Taiwan has a prodigious artistic and cultural life, the fortunate product of cultural blending and a vibrant civil society. From the Palace Museum down to village craftsmen, from the Cloud Gate Dance Company down to local rock bands, the Arts Program links both the existing and potential audiences in North America up with the Taiwan arts scene, along with all the cultural expressions that are at once awesome, colorful, and deeply moving.
Taiwan Booth at 2022 FIUTS CulturalFest International Expo_Courtesy of Margaret Tu
Just like its academic twin, creating and proliferating spaces for cultivating knowledge about Taiwan is at the heart of the Arts & Culture Program. This motive moves the Arts Program beyond mereply developing connections between Taiwan artists, performers, directors, authors, and corresponding organizations in the Seattle area and beyond, or organizing visiting exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, book tours, craft exhibits, and exchanges, but an intermediary that catalyzes and propagates mutual exchanges where moments of showcasing culture are always built with the capacity for knowledge-making and community-building. Audiences would connect both with the art, the cultural scenes, and with the artists, and vice versa. This also goes hand in hand with the Arts Program’s continual effort to strengthen its curriculum by offering one Taiwan arts and culture course per year, such as Made in Taiwan: Arts and Culture of Contemporary Taiwan offered by Ellen in Spring 2022, in conjunction with the other Taiwan-centric and -related courses offered throughout the UW, as well as to work with the East Asia Resources Center, the K-14 outreach arm of the UW East Asia Center, in putting Taiwan arts, culture, and social science products in the hands of teachers for integration into K-14 curricula.
The pandemic has drawn an unprecedented landscape, with both uncertainties and possibilities, for showcasing Taiwan arts and culture scenes and promoting cross-cultural exchanges. Digital products and social media (from Facebook to Twitter and Instagram) are thus central to the Arts Program’s endeavor to introduce Taiwan arts and culture to audiences across the Pacific Northwest and down the West Coast. Offering digital products for publication on social media not only gives the events a longer shelf-life that can be expected to attract audiences for years rather than months, but more importantly, provides a permanent repository for educators of Taiwan Studies, including at the UW, to teach in the classroom.
The Arts Program’s first in-person event, Small Island Big Song: Our Island, co-presented with Town Hall, Seattle, was a powerful encapsulation of the Program’s initiatives to re-envision the forms and modes of artistic and cultural exchanges. Featuring two Indigenous Taiwanese singer-songwriter-activists, Putad and Sauljaljui, and six musicians and vocalists from the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a collective of Austronesian musician-activists engaged the hearts and minds of the audiences participating in-person and online by integrating their artistry with their movement-building, which goes beyond the stage of Town Hall and continues to inspire the world in other digital forms, such as their interview and performance highlight with Seattle Sacred Music and Art.
Margaret Tu covers Panai Kusui’s LiúLàngJì at FIUTS CulturalFest-Courtesy of FIUTS
Young Children playing night-market games at the Taiwan Booth at FIUTS 2022 CulturalFest International Expo- Courtesy of Margaret Tu
The Arts Program’s partnership with institutions, organizations, communities and people around the world also resonates with the aspiration underlying its own programming. Margaret Tu’s performance that opened the night of FIUTS CulturalFest at Meany Center did not stop at her extraordinary cover of Indigenous Taiwanese indie-singer/social activist Panai Kusui’s song, LiúLàngJì [Wandering]. It called for recognition of not only Taiwan but Indigenous People on the land by communicating the struggles from the Indigenous community to which Margaret belongs and opening dialogues with other Indigenous people around the globe. Similarly, with the childhood activities and night market games carefully curated by the Taiwanese Youth Alliance of Pacific Northwest that invited people of all ages to learn, be inspired, build relationships, and feel joy, the Taiwan Booth at the CulturalFest International Expo—another fruitful collaboration came out of the Program’s community outreach—also shared the Arts Program’s commitment to knowledge-making and relationship-building at every moments of showcasing Taiwan’s arts and culture.
The same effort can be found in the two upcoming online multimedia festivals the Arts Program is co-presenting with Asiania and the University of Cambridge, respectively: Symphony 47: A Human Rights Festival (Feb 27 - Mar 13, 2022) and the Taiwan Film Series: Political Violence, Historical Trauma (Mar 7 - Mar 19, 2022). While both events were launched in commemoration of the February 28 Incident in Taiwan, the design of their programs, through which audiences can watch great films and musical and drama performances that are less well-known in the U.S. as well as a variety of panels with scholars, filmmakers, and front-line activists and influencers from across the globe as they discuss social and human rights issues within film, media, music, entertainment, and other industries, aspire to develop arts and culture programming into valuable opportunity to raise awareness, share knowledge, and to build deeper relationships.”
To learn more about the UW Taiwan Studies Arts & Culture Program’s exciting event lineup, follow @UWTaiwanStudies on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Eventbrite, or through newsletter subscription.
A big thank you to the Taiwan Studies Arts and Culture Program and their sponsorship and support of the FIUTS CulturalFest 2022!
Guest posts on the FIUTS blog represent the experiences and views of individual writers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FIUTS or any organizations or institutions affiliated with our programs.