Heterochronicity as Écriture féminineProblematising the Historical Traumas of Taiwan, China and Indonesia

Letter. Callus. Post-War
Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts
Taipei
12.07.19 – 22.09.19

Entering the exhibition space of Letter. Callus. Post-War, I was immediately struck by the aura of death that permeated the space. Facing the entrance is Lo Yi-chun’s Deer Rug, ostensibly the skin of a dead animal hung on the wall: an image of death. This was echoed by the soundtrack of Zhang-xu Zhan’s video installation,  Tale of Animal AT58, which featured a repetitive and oddly disquieting melody, in which the instruments of Indonesian gamelan and Chinese lion dance music – both ritualistic musical forms – intertwined. Behind the screen lay Zhang-xu’s signature paper sculpture, which employs techniques of zhizha, a traditional Chinese paper art most commonly used as funereal offering.

In a space so primed for haunting, repressed spectres are conjured up from a forgotten past. There is Rumphius, the now obscure naturalist employed by the Dutch East India Company, whose work had allegedly been stolen after his death by the much more famous Linnaeus ( Liu Yu’s Caecus creaturae ); there are Indonesian comfort women as captured by the lens of Meicy Sitorus, some of whom have passed away since their encounters with the artist; there is the grandfather of Maharani Mancanagara, who left behind a box of diaries and a life story that no family member wants to recount; and there is also Rika, the European woman who wrote a letter to a Chinese man in 1969, twenty-seven years after their meeting in Surabaya during the Second World War ( Au Sow-yee & Chen Yow-ruu, If We Do Not Exist, How Could Our Memories Remain and Not Pass Into Silence ). According to popular beliefs in Chinese societies, these are spirits stuck between the realms of the living and the dead because they harbour unfulfilled wishes. In Derrida’s terms, the ghost is that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. Generally, we can say that ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present; but in the specific cases mentioned above, the ghosts in fact have no place to dwell in the past, for they are residues that have fallen through the fissures in history writing.

It is precisely these long-forgotten vestiges that form the overarching theme of the show, but this is a ‘hauntology’ that operates on its own particular terms, as it foregrounds the letter and the body as the preferred mediums for channelling the spirits – which explains the ‘Letter’ and the ‘Callus’ in the title of the show. Familial and private documents such as letters and diaries serve as the starting points of several works, while the body is explored as the site of memory by some of the artists. To speak about unwritten history, effaced memory and unspeakable trauma is to disrupt time, to stop time in its tracks, to force it down a convoluted labyrinth where past, present and future are sometimes conflated. In Shen Chi-chung‘s psychoanalytic studies of trauma, three temporalities are identified: first, the actual occurrence of the unanticipated traumatic event; second, the reconstruction and interpretation of the traumatic event through the attribution of symbols; third, repeated discussions and re-interpretations, the need for which was caused by the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event and the ensuing anxiety. That is to say, the traumatic subject no longer experiences time as linear and exclusively forward-moving. Instead, temporal disjunction becomes the imperative condition of being, as the traumatic event becomes a point in time of eternal return.

It is in view of this sense of heterochronicity, stipulated by the artistic and curatorial choice to focus on historical trauma, that the significance of the letter and the callus becomes apparent. The form of the written letter has beyond doubt become anachronistic, but additionally it has always been a heterochronic thing. There is always a chasm of time separating the act of writing and sending the letter and the act of receiving and reading it. Compared with its electronic cousin, the written letter always contains more than its written contents, as it is inevitably marked by its materiality: the ink smudge, the tear stain, the traces of its journey, the yellowing and brittling paper… Letters like the ones Lin Yi-chi dug out from her family home are affixed to specific points in time ( when they were written ), while carrying traces from all the times that they have passed through. Lin’s grandmother was separated from her brother half a century ago, when the latter decided to leave Kinmen in Taiwan for ‘Nanyang’ ( the Chinese term for Southeast Asia ) in search of better prospects. He finally settled on Bangka Island, Indonesia, and the siblings stayed in touch by letter for years. In her effort to tell the story of a family that came to be separated by geographical distance, national borders and cultural identities, Lin travelled to Bangka with the decades-old family letters as her only pointer. Here, what appears to be a spatial movement ( from the destination to the origin of the letter ) is in fact also a temporal one ( from present-day to the time when the letters were written ). In the resulting video work, Nanyang Express: Trans-drifting and South Sea Crossing, documentary footage of present-day Bangka goes hand in hand with an audio track comprising voices reading out the family letters and Lin’s own oral communication with her distant relatives. As in Lo Yi-chun’s Deer Rug, which is in fact made of sun-dried banana skins ( an important Taiwan export immediately after the Second World War ) stitched together by the artist into a faux deerskin ( an important export of Dutch Formosa in the seventeenth century ), different time periods overlap, intertwine and finally collapse into each other, to form a multilayered and malleable temporality.

In another bid to engage with the lived realities of grandparents, Maharani Mancanagara’s project began when she was given a box of diaries by the grandfather that she never knew. She later found out that he was actually a victim in Gerakan 30 September, a coup d’état organised by Suharto and his aides in 1965, which was followed by a mass extermination of everyone suspected to be communist. The incident was the preface to Suharto’s New Order Government, and discourses about it were tightly controlled by the Indonesian state for many years. Memories about it became taboo and gave rise to transgenerational trauma in many families such as Mancanagara’s. Interestingly, the artist did not choose to represent the traumatic event or her grandfather’s experience after her archival and field research. Instead, she opted for the form of the children’s folk tale and created Tale of Wanatentrem Chronicle #2, in which the story of oppression and resistance are told through the imagined animal characters of mouse-deers and frigatebirds fighting against pirates. The mouse-deer also appears in Zhang-xu’s Tale of Animal AT58, for which he reimagines Chinese and Indonesian folk tales and creates the new cross-bred half-fox and half-mouse-deer figure. Their choice of engaging with history through animal characters and children’s folk tales is curious, in that it signals a kind of regression, which is at once a common response to trauma and a therapeutic strategy for dealing with trauma.

Contrary to the letter, the callus symbolises a completely different form of memory: one that does not register with the conscious mind. A callus is by definition an area of thickened skin that forms in response to repeated friction or pressure, and as such it is an apt analogy for phylogenetic memory, which results from an experience that repeatedly etches a neurological trace from being periodically recalled, until the trace becomes a permanent pathway that can be inherited by offspring. Analogies aside, the callus is the material manifestation of the body as a site of memory. Meicy Sitorus’s images of comfort women – young girls and women forced into sexual slavery under Japan’s military rule across Asia – in the project Nana Djawa focus in turn on the elderly women’s faces, gaze, hands, feet, hair and their still or moving bodies while engaging in everyday activities. These coloured photographs are placed opposite a new series resulting from Sitorus’s residency in Taiwan. For this project, she photographed sites where ‘comfort stations’ ( a euphemism for Japanese military brothels ) used to be located. The spots have variously become a nursery, a city park, disused plots of land and more. In the two photographic series, she constructs a topography of violence and suffering by documenting both bodies and geographical locations, not only as sites of extreme wartime brutality, but also of ongoing afflictions caused by collective silence and amnesia in the name of the forward-looking project of nation-building.

A temporal violence to the material and bodily heterochronicity is to be found in these works. As it erupts, it implodes normative linear time and sabotages the perimeters of memory and history imposed by various regimes and their ideologies. In this transmuted temporality, the undead bodies of repressed spectres are finally brought back to the present, where they complicate and problematise the question of historical trauma from the colonial and postcolonial pasts of Taiwan and Indonesia, which can no longer be reduced to a linear and unidirectional causality. Sitorus’s project most palpably evokes the work of Hélène Cixous, who posits that the physicality of the female body is closely connected to female authorship, to the ability of women to write and utter their truths. However, I also consider the general privileging of the heterochronic in the show as a form of Écriture féminine, for Cixous also remarks in her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ ( 1975/6 ) that ‘in woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history’. In Letter. Callus. Post-War the artists, alongside curator Chen Hsiang-wen, manage to ‘un-think the unifying, regulating history that homogenises’ by implementing heterochronicity as a tactic for interfering with history writing. The space and temporality that they carve out for heterogeneous remembering and writing will serve as fertile ground for the mutation of memory and history in times to come.

作为阴性书写的异时性:
中国台湾与印度尼西亚历史创伤的问题化

情书客手茧客后战争
关渡美术馆,中国台北
2019年7月12日-2019年9月22日

译 / 梁霄

进入展览“情书客手茧客后战争”后,我立刻被弥漫在空间内的死亡气息攫击。面对着入口的作品是罗懿君的《鹿革》,看似一张挂在墙上的动物皮:一个死亡的形象。这与张徐展影像作品《动物故事AT58》中的配乐相呼应,后者刻画了一种重复、奇怪而令人不安的旋律,两种被用在仪式上的音乐形式—印尼加美兰音乐与中国舞狮音乐交织其间。在屏幕背后,张徐展标志性的纸雕塑伫立在地上,艺术家创作时采用了中国传统“纸扎”技术,而“纸扎”则通常被用来当作葬礼祭品。

在这个幽冥萦绕的地方,受压抑的灵魂从被遗忘的过去被召唤出来:郎弗安斯,一位受雇于荷属东印度公司的博物学家,他默默无闻鲜为人知,据说其研究在死后被更为声名卓越的卡尔客林奈(Linnaeus)窃取(刘玗《失明的造物者》);在梅西客西托鲁斯(Meicy Sitorus)镜头中出现的印度尼西亚的慰安妇们,当中的一些人在与艺术家见面之后就去世了;马哈拉妮客马羌那嘎拉(Maharani Mancanagara)的祖父,他留下了一盒日记,和一个所有的家庭成员至今也不愿讲述的人生故事;当然还有欧洲人丽卡(Rika),第二次世界大战期间她与一名中国男子在泗水相识,于二十七年后的1969年写了一封信给他(区秀诒、陈侑汝《当我们都不在了,记忆如何存在而不过渡于寂静之中》)。依据中国社会的普遍信仰,这些人的灵魂被困在生死之间,因为他们怀有尚未实现的愿望。用德里达的话来说,“幽灵”既不是活的也不是死的,既非在场亦非缺席。不过通常而言,我们可以声称鬼魂自过去浮现于此刻;但在上述案例中,他们实际上却并未曾停留在那些过去的地方,因为他们是从历史书写的缝隙中跌落的残留。

这些被长期遗忘的痕迹构成了展览贯穿始终的主题,化身为一个以其自身特有的方式所展开的“幽灵缠绕论”(hauntology):它强调了作为精神引导的首选媒介“文字”与“身体”,并以此解释了出现在展览标题中的“情书”和“手茧”。来自家庭和私人的文件,如信件与日记,是展览中一些作品的出发点,而身体则被部分艺术家视为记忆的场所加以探索。谈论未被书写的历史、抹去的记忆和难以言说的创伤,就意味着扰乱时间,让时间停在它的轨迹上,迫使它走进一座错综复杂的迷宫,而过去、现在和未来间或交织其中。在沈志忠(Shen Chi-Chung,音译)关于创伤的精神分析研究中,他明确了创伤的三个时间阶段:首先,是意外创伤事件的实际发生;其次,是通过符号归因对创伤事件进行的重构和解读;最后,是就创伤的反复讨论与重新解释,这种需要源于创伤的不可理解性与随之而来的焦虑感。换言之,受到创伤的人不再将时间看作是线性的和完全向前的。相反,时间的分裂是存在的必要条件,而创伤事件则成为这永恒回返的时间当中的一点。

正是由于这种聚焦历史创伤的艺术和策展选择所规定的异时性,“情书”和“手茧”的意义才变得显而易见。毫无疑问,手写信件的形式已经过时了,但除此之外,它一直都是某种异时性的东西。写信寄出与收取读信的行为之间总是存在着一道将它们分隔的时间的鸿沟。与电子邮件相比,手写信件本身包含的内容总是比它的书面内容要多,因为它不可避免地要被自身的物质属性所标记:墨迹、泪痕、运送过程中的刮碰,泛黄和脆化……正如艺术家林羿绮找到的那些家书,它们贴合着特定的时间节点(被书写的时刻),同时又携带着自身所经历的所有的时间痕迹。林的祖母在半个世纪前与她的兄弟分开,当时,后者为了更好的前途决定离开台湾金门前往“南洋”(中国俗语中的东南亚)。最终,这位林羿绮的长辈在印度尼西亚的邦加岛(Bangka)定居下来,并且和自己的亲人保持着多年的通信。为了讲述这个被地理距离、国界和文化身份所阻隔的家庭故事,林羿绮带着这些多年积攒下来的家书去了邦加岛,它们是她唯一的线索。林羿绮看似作为空间运动(从信件的目的地到它的出发地)的艺术实践,事实上也是一种时间的运动(从此刻到信件被书写的时刻)。在林羿绮最终产出的影像作品《信使:返向漂流与南洋彼岸》中,邦加岛如今的影像纪录片段与艺术家特制的音频相结合,后者包括朗读家书的声音,以及林羿绮与远方亲人的口头交流。就像罗懿君的创作,那张被她编织拼凑的“鹿革”(17世纪荷属“福尔摩沙”的重要出口产品)事实上是被晒干的香蕉皮(“二战”后台湾的重要出口产品),不同的时间彼此交叠、缠绕,最终形成了多层次的、可以被塑造的时间性。

另一件与祖辈的现实生活有关的作品来自马哈拉妮客马羌那嘎拉。她收到了一盒从未相识的祖父写下的日记。后来马哈拉妮才知道,祖父是“印尼九客三〇事件”的受害者:1965年9月30日,苏哈托(Suharto)和他的同党组织了一场军事政变,随后对所有被怀疑是共产主义者的人进行了清洗屠杀。这一事件成为苏哈托新政权建立秩序的前奏,而关于它的讨论多年来则一直受到印尼政府的严格控制。在许多像马哈拉妮客马羌那嘎拉这样的家庭中,关于这件事的记忆早已变为禁忌和跨越代际的创伤。但有趣的是,马哈拉妮在获得历史文献和实地研究的结果之后,并没有选择直接表现创伤事件或者祖父的经历。相反,艺术家采撷了儿童民间故事的创作形式,完成了作品《瓦纳坦任编年史的故事#2》,通过虚构的鼠鹿和军舰鸟等动物角色,构建了一个以压迫与反抗为主题的故事。“鼠鹿”同样出现在了张徐展的《动物故事AT58》中,他在作品里重新想象了中国和印度尼西亚的民间故事,创造了一个新的半狐狸半鼠鹿的纸糊形象。艺术家通过动物角色和儿童民间故事来讲述历史,这很奇怪,因为这样的选择标志着某种复归,既是对创伤的普遍反应,也是应对创伤的治疗策略。

与书信不同的是,手茧则象征着一种完全不同的、不能被意识所察觉的记忆形式。按照定义,茧是在反复摩擦或压力下形成的增厚的皮肤区域,就此而言,它能够成为一种恰当的对于族生记忆的类比。茧是某种经历的结果:从周期性的记忆中反复蚀刻出神经的痕迹,直到这种痕迹成为可以被后代继承的永久性的东西。而撇开类比不谈,茧本身即是身体作为记忆场所的物质表现。在《相遇,形象》(Nana Djawa)中,梅西客西托鲁斯拍摄了一批慰安妇的照片—在亚洲范围内,一些年轻女孩和少妇曾在日本军事统治下被迫成为性奴隶—梅西的镜头聚焦于这些已经年老的女人的面部、眼神、手、脚和头发,以及她们在日常生活中或静止或移动的身体。与这些彩色照片并置的是梅西客西托鲁斯的另一个新系列,由艺术家在台湾驻地时完成。在这批作品中,她拍摄了慰安所(日本军队妓院的委婉说法)的旧址。这些地方如今已经变成了各种各样的苗圃、城市公园,甚至沦为废弃的土地等等。通过在两组影像系列中分别展现身体形象和地理位置,梅西客西托鲁斯构造了某种暴力与苦难的地形学:它不仅记录了极端战争时期暴行发生的场所,也记录了在滚滚向前的国家建设的名义之下,集体性沉默和遗忘所造成的持续痛苦。

在这些呈现于展览中的作品身上,我们能够发现一种针对物质和身体的异时性的时间性暴力。当它爆发时,规范的、线性的时间将会受到扰乱,而各种政权及其意识形态强加给我们的记忆和历史的边界也会遭到破坏。在这种转化的时间中,受压抑的幽灵的“不死之身”最终被带回当下,使台湾和印度尼西亚在殖民和后殖民时代的历史创伤问题变得复杂,不再能够被归结为线性和单向的因果关系。梅西客西托鲁斯的作品或许可以令我们想起爱莲客西苏(Hélène Cixous),她认为女性身体的物质性与女性作者的身份密切相关,也与女性书写和诉说自身真相的能力密切相关。然而,我认为展览对异时性的普遍强调也是一种形式的“阴性书写”(écriture féminine),因为爱莲客西苏在《美杜莎的笑》(The Laugh of the Medusa,1975/1976)里说过:“在女人这里,一个女人的历史和所有女人的历史,以及国家和世界的历史都融合在一起。”在展览“情书客手茧客后战争”中,与策展人陈湘汶一道的艺术家们试图通过异时性的历史书写策略来“反思统一的、规范的与均质化的历史”。他们为异质性的回溯和书写所开辟的时空,会在将来成为记忆与历史异变的沃土。