Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

AU Sow-Yee’s live cinema, The Mountain Epidemic, was an adaptation of a novella of the same title by LI Zi-Shu, making the shifting between moving images and text a core issue. How to represent the taboo and violent history of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) became the key to initiate a dialogue between the two media. The novella recounted the legendary story of the guerilla leader, WEN Yi, who was deemed as a guardian of the mountains. Interwoven with an unofficial and oral history, it had a great sense of cinema. On the other hand, the live cinema was conducted with several projectors and films, combined with the projection of archive images and sound effect design that resembled shadow play, the moving images projected on the wall were blurry and out of focus the entire time. The creative intention was more than obvious: the Malayan CommunistParty was like a ghost, possessing an absent presence, always looking at their adherents on the peninsula. While they gazed into each other, its existence was still excluded from history. (Commentator: SING Song-Yong)

Artwork Introduction

The novel, Mountain Plagues, tells a story from a period after World War II, when the British Army in Malaya tried to extinguish communism. Told through the use of analepsis, the story reveals the past about both the author’s grandfather and the legendary figure, Captain Wen Yi, who had participated in the operation. If there are rules to this “performance,” they would be the novel itself, “live cinema,” and the space/venue, “•  Qidong House” (now Taiwan Literature Base). The novel, whether serves as the foundation or deconstructed and reconstructed for this production, has either echoed or questioned about the past through reflection. Our understanding of the Malayan Communist Party during the Cold War can easily be obscured by romanticization due to a nostalgically longing for revolution. The absence in historical writing consequently becomes filled by a certain “romanticized imagination,” as if the army that was left behind to its own demise by the Chinese Communist Party and hunted by the British Army has assumed a lonely presence shaped by repeated abandonment at the Thai border. Our imagination of the Malayan Communist Party as “the defeated” is somehow coupled with an image of the tragic hero in the jungle. However, what matters especially in this performance is the question about “the defeated.” Through a bursting and disintegrating process, the specters of history in the narrative of the novel escape again from the interstices. The Angelus Novus of Walter Benjamin and the storm of history seem to create a certain presence, and the multi-dialogues of history is re-initiated in a space closely associated with past colonial history. It also brings to mind the idea of “imperfect cinema” discussed by Cuban director Juan García Espinosa—“[it] is an answer, but it is also a question which will discover its own answers in the course of its development.”

About the Artist 

“approaching theatre”is an award-winning avant-garde theatre based in Taiwan, co-founded by Koh Choon-eiow (Malaysia) and Cheng Yin-chen (Taiwan). Their work focus mainly in questioning how Asian people drift and survive in history, post-colonial politics and capitalism power. Meanwhile, they continue their interest in developing the methodology for training contemporary performers, transforming the fundamental core of Chinese traditional aesthetic into a living physical and mental mechanism with serenity.