Courtney Stephens: Invention

In the 1960s, an avant-garde film/video movement emerged in Taiwan as a post-war generation was exposed to international art movements after studying abroad. Filled with disgust for war, these artists also rebelled against traditional Chinese and Japanese aesthetics, embracing modern art practices from across the world, placing influences of Dada, surrealism and other modernist movements into dialog with (and opposition to) traditional Chinese and Japanese aesthetics. Since this moment, a small but engaged avant-garde film culture has persisted in Taiwan with contemporary work influenced by these earlier practitioners while continuing to explore such issues as cultural marginalisation, obscurity and the sense of multiple identity as informed by fifty years of Japanese colonization and post-war autocratic governance.