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Date
Time
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Venue
Brunei Gallery
Room
B204

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In this event, we are pleased to invite Chris Cristóbal Chan to explore the Matsu Islands as a site of artistic and touristic imagination, where contemporary art, border tensions, and shifting geopolitical narratives intersect.

The Matsu Islands lie at the front lines of a precariously fluid border in the Taiwan Strait, where the idea of war exists today in a doubled sense:  suspended between traumatic memories of twentieth-century Chinese Civil War and the anxious anticipations of a potential future conflict.

Yet, the islands are also a cultural battleground over imaginations of the future, where competing aesthetics and cultural productions (such as the recent “Matsu Biennial”) increasingly give form to new constructed imaginations of security and precarity in conjunction with anticipations of war and peace. The transition of the militarized islands into touristic islands have thus gone hand in hand with the mobilization of artists in lieu of soldiers on the archipelagic front line.  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan (ROC) maintained a strict lockdown of its borders, and as a result Taiwanese tourists who would otherwise be visiting popular foreign countries such as Japan and Thailand had no choice but to explore the exotic from within Taiwanese territories.  At the same time, Taiwan’s most peripheral Matsu Islands off the coast of China had been preparing for imaginary Chinese tourists who could no longer enter across Taiwanese borders.  

The predicament brought about by the border restrictions resulted in a curious mismatch of imagined Chinese tourists and imagining Taiwanese tourists on the islands of Matsu, which was hosting its inaugural Matsu Biennial “art island” transformation in 2022.  

Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2022-2023, I examine the intersections of border island tourism with imaginations of both local islanders and visiting artists making contemporary art for touristic consumption on the “front lines” (Szonyi 2008) of maritime border in the Taiwan Strait.  I suggest that the imagination of touristic representations is not simply enacted by tourism authorities and tourists; instead, it is mediated by the imaginations of artists, the creators of art objects for touristic consumption, and inflected by their fictional re-imaginations of past and future made real.

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Chris Cristóbal Chan

Chris is an Anthropology PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley and former Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow based at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His research involves imaginations of sovereignty as it is (re)mediated through making art and remaking environments. 

Through a multi-sited ethnography across various field sites off the coast of China, his research follows a series of seafaring artists who are involved in site-specific work on border islands situated at China’s pelagic peripheries and examines how their mobility and mobilization by the state make manifest a greater concern with living-with or contending with future crisis. 

The role that artists and the environment play together in crafting culture in crisis becomes a lens through which the contemporary problem of China (as both a real entity in the world as well as a real notion that inflects how we live in and see the world) can be studied as an anthropological question. His research has also been the recipient of the Social Science Research Council International Research Fellowship as well as the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.

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