Entrenching cold war politics through curatorial practices

What is it about?

This article examines how museums and curatorial practices shape public understanding of history, particularly in relation to cold war narratives. It focuses on the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s exhibition The Wild Eighties: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan and its presentation of the documentary How History Was Wounded: An Exclusive Report on Taiwanese Media. I argue that curatorial abstraction—a process of simplifying complex histories to fit a particular narrative—acts as a form of historical violence that extends Cold War ideologies into the present.

Featured Image

Photo by Faye Yu on Unsplash

Photo by Faye Yu on Unsplash

Why is it important?

My work challenges the power of curatorial practices in shaping history, which is particularly relevant for understanding how museums act as institutions that not only display history but actively shape public memory an identity. My work also exposes the persistence of cold war structures of feeling in Taiwan today, and the ways it links to the Taiwanese media’s role in historical representations of political struggles. This is crucial for scholars studying how ideological structures persist even after the geopolitical conflicts that produced them have supposedly ended. Finally, my work connects the museum to global capitalist structures. I show how funding policies, particularly from culture-focused government bodies, serve state agendas by constructing ways of knowing and being that align with neoliberal capitalist development.

Perspectives

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This article came from a visit to the museum that was unplanned. It came as a great surprise to me how stories of ideology, affect, and global geopolitical economy could emerge within the museum.

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