Written by Chee-Hann Wu.
Image credit: ‘A One and A Two: Edward Yang Retrospective’ at Taipei Fine Arts Museum by Chee-Hann Wu.
2023 has been a year of revival for Taiwan’s arts and cultural events. Based on data from OPENTIX, the box office for arts and cultural events in 2022, including but not limited to theatre, music concerts, exhibitions, and popular and creative cultural products, exceeded NTD 1.14 billion (36.3 million USD), almost reaching the pre-pandemic standard. Although the data for 2023 is not yet available, many people expect the performance to surpass that of the previous year.
Besides the box office, there are also several incidents happening in 2023 that have been widely discussed. Two important figures in the art industry, Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming (1938-2023) and Shi Wen-Long (1928-2023), entrepreneur and founder of Chimei Museum, passed away in 2023. Actress Pei-Hsia Lai, who starred in the Netflix series Wave Makers (2023), unexpectedly pulled out from M.O.V.E. Theatre and Taiwan Performing Arts Center’s co-production of The Mush Room due to her promise to run for the vice president with Terry Guo in the 2024 presidential election, which ultimately led to the cancellation of the entire show, not to mention Guo and Lai’s decision not to run two months later.
In addition to Lai’s real-life drama, Wave Makers also sparked the #Metoo movement in Taiwan, involving many figures in the arts and culture industry. While many cases are still under legal investigation, many individuals, organizations and unions of the related industry, as well as legislators, are calling on the Ministry of Culture and other relevant government agencies to address the issue of sexual harassment and assault in the arts and cultural work environment, protect the rights of victims, and reform the system of incentives, subsidies, and funding.
Exhibitions and Highlights
Besides the aforementioned incidents, there were several important exhibitions in 2023. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts presented the most comprehensive exhibition of Huang Tu-Shui. The exhibition, An Undefeatable Quest for Freedom and Beauty: The Life and Art of Huang Tu-Shui, which opened in March 2023, featured 37 sculptures, including the most famous piece, Water of Immortality, as well as an extensive selection of archives. Huang Tu-Shui (1895-1930), born in colonial Taiwan, was recognized as the sole representative of Taiwan’s sculptural scene between the 1910s and 1930s and had been selected to compete with Japanese sculptors in Teiten (帝展). With an extensive collection of Huang’s work, the exhibition encouraged a reexamination of Taiwan’s art history.
Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) also featured a series of significant exhibitions in 2023. 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of TFAM. The Wild Eighties: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan, the first curated exhibition celebrating the Museum’s 40th anniversary, reconfigured the socio-political environment of the 1980s in conversation with the cultural scenes.
Co-organized by the TFAM and the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI), A One and A Two: Edward Yang Retrospective, featuring film director Yang’s manuscripts, documents, archives, and interviews, opened in July 2023. It offered a panoramic view of Yang’s journey and his 30-year career. Roughly at the same time, another TFAM exhibition, Keeping to My Path: A Retrospective of Ka Tokurai, unfolded artist Ka Tokurai (Ho Te-Lai, 1904-1986)’s life and story as he paved his own artistic path outside of the official art exhibition system under Japanese colonial Taiwan.
2023 was also a year in which interdisciplinary and multimedia art creations flourished. In collaboration with film director Singing Chen, the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE) presented The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, an immersive VR (virtual reality) short film, with an exhibition featuring archives of letters, artworks, execution documents of political victims of the White Terror, and songs they sang in prison. In addition, in the basement of the museum, there was also an exhibition of the notes, props, and clothes used for the VR filming, as well as behind-the-scenes videos.
The Blooming of Musical Theatre
As scholar Yi-Ping Wu addressed in the 2022 Taiwan Theatre Report, the musical industry in Taiwan had seen significant advancement in the year of its increase in the number of productions and box office. It was not a surprise that musical theatre continued to thrive in 2023, with multiple large-scale productions focusing on diverse themes.
As Wu wrote in the report, Taiwan’s production of the off-Broadway musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change was extremely well received and ran for more than 150 performances in 2022. The musical made a grand return with the original cast and more shows in 2023, and many of which were sold out at the moment of release. The show will continue to run throughout the first quarter of 2024.
Another must-mentioned musical in 2023 is VM Theatre Company’s Don’t Cry, Dancing Girls the Musical. The musical has been widely discussed since its first staged reading in 2021, and it was an instant hit when it officially opened in 2023. Most tickets sold out within seconds, and many theatre enthusiasts travelled across the country to see the show. It is no exaggeration to say that Don’t Cry, Dancing Girls the Musical changed Taiwan’s musical theatre landscape not only because of its popularity but also because of the local stories that were told. Heavily researched, the musical features Taiwan’s local ritual practice, the Soul Guiding Array, also known as khan-bông kua-tīn in Taiwanese. With stories of family, memory, loss and rebirth, the musical introduces audiences to local traditions and a different face of Taiwanese musicals.
In addition to original musicals, several musical productions in 2023 were adapted from other mediums. Studio M’s i WEiRDO The Musical was an adaptation of the well-received 2020 film of the same name, and Tropical Angels: A Taiwanese Musical was adapted from Chen Qian Wu (or Chen Chien-wu)’s novel Hunting Captive Women (獵女犯) about his experience as a Taiwanese soldier fighting for the Japanese empire during World War II. Raid on Taihoku, by Mizo Games, started in 2017 as a board game about the largest Allied air raid on the city of Taihoku—Taipe—then under Japanese colonial rule during World War II. A collection of novels with stories by six different novelists, all under the same framework of the board game, was published in 2022. In 2023, Raid on Taihoku was turned into a PC game and a musical, both under the same title. The musical is making its return in March 2024.
It can be expected that musical theatre will continue to thrive in 2024. Extensive shows have been announced, including the Mandarin version of the Broadway musical Hedwig And the Angry Inch by Studio M, the international co-production of The Wedding Banquet, adapted from Ang Lee’s film C Musical’s Let Me Fly, originally produced and developed in Korea, and many more.
The Crossroad of Cultural Policy and Industry
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to the Development of Cultural and Creative Industries Act to regulate ticket scalping (or ticket resale). Ticket scalping refers to an act by a person who sells tickets for arts and cultural events at a price higher than the face value of the tickets or at a fixed price and who purchases tickets for arts and cultural events by using a computer or other related equipment to obtain a reservation or a voucher to collect the tickets by using false information or other fraudulent means. The issue of ticket scalping became more prominent, especially after the market reopened following the pandemic and more events were scheduled or took place. Members of the public complained that they were unable to obtain tickets on their own and had to turn to scalpers for tickets at double or triple the price. The new amendment is expected to help stop the act and develop a healthier environment for event ticketing.
In an effort to revitalize the arts and culture industry and encourage the public to expand their consumption of arts and culture after the pandemic, residents in Taiwan between the ages of 18 and 21 were included in the ministry’s 2023 cash handout program, launched by the Ministry of Culture, in June. Officially known as Culture Points, the program aims to foster young adults’ appreciation of culture and the arts, as well as support Taiwan’s cultural and creative industries. Each person was given 1200 points, equivalent to NT$1200. The points can be used for exhibitions, performances, museum visits, screening of Taiwanese films, and purchasing of books, records, crafts and art pieces, among others.
The new round of handouts has recently started in January 2024, and the eligibility has been expanded to people aged 16 to 22. Specifically, shoppers at independent bookstores will receive one reward point for every two points used, and purchasers of youth tickets to performing arts events or tickets to Taiwanese movies will receive 100 reward points. In this way, it is hoped that related industries will flourish and become more sustainable.
Culture Points certainly bring positive impacts to physical bookstores. Based on the data from the Ministry of Finance, the total sales of physical books and ebooks in 2023 are higher than in 2022. However, many in publishing still feel the increasing struggles of the industry, and the public also witnessed the closure of several publishers and bookstores that once marked milestones for Taiwan’s publishing industry.
The Lion Books (or Hsiung Shih 雄獅), one of the earliest and most important publishers focusing on the publications of fine arts-related books, closed down after being in business for half a century. The 24-hour flagship Eslite bookstore in Taipei’s Xinyi District also shut down after 18 years there. Zheng Da Bookstore (政大書城), a chain bookstore popular among students due to its book discounts, unexpectedly announced the closure of one of the three only stores it owned. Fortunately, after the announcement, the bookstore received extensive support from the readers and suppliers and thus decided to continue the business.
The discrepancy between the actual increase in sales and the feeling of challenges in the publishing industry is likely due to the fact that publishers are still navigating through industrial transformation, such as changes in readers’ preferences regarding book genres and types of copies (physical or digital), as well as issues of increasing costs of book publishing, lack of resources, disproportionate workloads and wages, among others.
To briefly conclude, it was exciting that parts of Taiwan’s arts and cultural industries were able to achieve comparable sales and attention before the pandemic and attract attention in 2023. However, the year also marked an urgent need for change due to changes in people’s lifestyles and shopping habits. Undoubtedly, it has become a more challenging task for industries to adapt and sustain themselves in the midst of a rapidly changing world. The role of the government should also be reconfigured, not to act as a funding agency, but to fundamentally support the industries in a timely manner and make them more robust by focusing on long-term and prospective planning, reforming current related policies and funding mechanisms for proper and just distribution of resources, developing a more effective way of collecting sales data, helping to create a more sustainable work environment, and addressing issues of low wages.
Chee-Hann Wu is an assistant professor faculty fellow (postdoc) in Theatre Studies at NYU. She received her Ph.D. in Drama and Theatre from the University of California, Irvine. Chee-Hann is drawn to performance by and with nonhumans including but not limited to objects, puppets, ecology, and technology. Her research focuses on nonhuman life, being, and ability to embody and reenact memories that have previously been suppressed. Chee-Hann’s current book project considers puppetry a mediated means to narrate Taiwan’s cultural and sociopolitical development, colonial and postcolonial experiences, as well as Indigenous histories. Her most recent work explores video games and VR through the lens of theatre and performance.