Art, violence and memory in Taiwan: Telling the story of the beautiful island

Taiwan is a liminal site of modernity in Asia. It is a modern exemplar as a liberaldemocracy with a developed economy, but is mostly unrecognized as a nation-state inthe international system. In its liminality, however, it traces contours of modern powerand their epistemological expression. This paper presents an account of Taiwan as anobject of knowledge and representation in instances of scholarship and policy, Taiwanesepolitics, urban development and art, arguing that the narratives through which Taiwan isunderstood embed a lived experience as Taiwanese under forms of epistemologicaldomination. The paper then explores Taiwanese responses of co-option and resistancein alternative sites of knowledge, and it concludes that the critical unexamined force inTaiwan’s experience of modernity is violence