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Abstract(s)
Exemplifying with two Taiwanese national museums built in the 1950s and 1960s, this paper demonstrates how nationalism played a central role in shaping the development of Modern architecture in post-war Taiwan. After WWII, the Nationalist Party (KMT) retroceded Taiwan from Japan but simultaneously retreat there. This led to their strong attempt to reconstruct a cultural, historical, and ethnic relationships between Taiwan and China. The KMT strived to erase any traces of Japanese colonial constructions and to redirect the island’s social identity toward the Chinese Nationalist’s traditions. Such rise of Chinese nationalism stimulated several architects to search for a national style. They traced the root of the style from the past and connected it to their modern designs with an attempt to create a sense of community and national identity visually.
With Taipei’s Nanhai Academy and the National Palace Museum as case studies, this paper argues that ‘museum’ has come to be conceptualized, not merely as place of exhibition, but as political symbols which represent the official definition of the nation. ‘Museum’ was given a political function and loaded with powerful political icons: axial and ceremonial arrangement of spaces, iconographic programmes and spatial narratives, evolutionary chronological displaying, pseudo-Chinese classical architectural elements, and the sculptures/ portraits of political elites placed in squares and exhibition halls. This paper contends that the two exemplifying museums which carry political function actually visualize the imagination of the nation. By interpreting these museum architectures in a broader social and political context, and verifying with museology, the paper demonstrates that an investigation of the Chinese national style would be inevitable if a better understanding of the development of modern architecture in Post-war Taiwan is to be achieved.
Description
Keywords
Nationalism National Museum Taipei’s National Palace Museum Chiang Kai-shek
Citation
TSAI, Jung-jen – The Construction of Chinese National Identity and the Designs of National Museums during the Early Post-war Period in Taiwan in REGIONALISM, NATIONALISM & MODERN ARCHITECTURE. Proceedings. Porto: CEAA, 2018, p. 449-464