Growing ties and exchanges as cultural ice across Taiwan Strait thaws
Nine years ago, cultural relations between Taiwan and the mainland could have been summed up by Beijing's ban on Taiwan's biggest pop star, A-Mei, for singing Taiwan's national anthem at the May 2000 inauguration of president Chen Shui-bian.
Since the beginning of Mr Chen's second term in 2004, the cultural ice across the Taiwan Strait has steadily thawed, a process which further accelerated with the mainland-friendly policies of Ma Ying-jeou, who completed his first year as president of Taiwan last week.
Museums from Taiwan and the mainland are lending each other artworks, TV and film producers are envisioning a unified market, and in music - aside from Taiwan's pop crooners increasing dependence on mainland audiences for their pay cheques - even indie rock bands are finding ways to play clubs and festivals in what was once the terra incognita of the other side.
Recently, the Taipei County Government issued a press release for a 'Cross-Strait Dumpling Exchange Banquet'. It seems that not even shui jiao are immune from the fervour.
One of the biggest official exchanges of culture ever will come in October, when Chinese museums, including the National Palace Museum in Beijing, will lend 37 pieces to a Taiwan exhibition on art and artefacts related to the Yongzheng Emperor, a Qing dynasty ruler of the 18th century. 'This is the first time we'll ever be exhibiting works on loan from the Forbidden City. This is a very big deal,' said Sylvia Sun, a public affairs officer at Taiwan's National Palace Museum.
Taiwan's National Palace Museum contains most of the priceless antiques amassed by the Qing emperors, which Chiang Kai-shek brought to Taiwan from the Forbidden City for safekeeping while warring against Mao Zedong's communist army in the 1940s. As a symbol of national patrimony and legitimacy for both Chiang's Republic of China and Mao's People's Republic of China, the collection has remained an awkward sticking point and reminder of that split.
Taiwan still has laws that prevent its National Palace from loaning works to any country that has not passed a law guaranteeing their return, and China still insists on calling the Taiwan museum the 'Taipei' National Palace. But scholarly exchange between the two National Palaces is increasing, and since Taiwan's opening to mainland tourists last year, the Taipei museum's galleries have been so flooded that limitations have been set on visits by tour groups. There are no limits, however, for individual visitors.
Exchanges in contemporary art, meanwhile, have had no such problems. Much as Taiwanese investors have helped grow the mainland's economy since Mao died, Taiwanese collectors spent much of the past decade pumping up the mainland's art market, which, at least before the world economy turned south last year, saw 10-year-old paintings by top Chinese artists selling at auction for millions of US dollars. The general mainland buzz has also lured some Taiwanese artists to set up studios in the country's art hot spots such as Beijing's 798 complex, where they get more international exposure.
As for institutions, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei has within the past year hosted two large shows organised by mainland curators and featuring dozens of mainland artists. The most recent, 'Spectacle', opened with mainland artist Gao Feng piloting a piece of flying luggage - there was a remote control helicopter inside the bag - to land on Taiwanese soil, a bold statement if there ever was one.
Taiwan still remains the pop music factory for the Greater China market, though mainly because of a growing dependence on the mainland market. In 1997, Taiwanese bought 47 million CDs. Last year, they bought 5 million. To combat piracy, downloading and the overall death of physical music, big music companies such as Sony and Warner Music Group now generally sign contracts that cover not just publishing rights for their artists, but management rights as well. This means that when Jolin Tsai goes on a stadium tour of the mainland, her record company shares in the take. Some Taiwanese music company bosses now spend as much as half their time in the mainland, and with mainland revenues too powerful to ignore, no Taiwanese pop star has so much as gone within camera range of a nationalist flag since A-Mei's faux pas of nine years ago.
Indie bands have also managed to build their own channels across the Taiwan Strait, even though there's hardly any money in it and rockers are far less afraid of politics. In 2007, China's rock 'n' roll godfather, Cui Jian, who was banned for 15 years from performing in major venues in Beijing, got official permission to play at a Taiwanese music festival. Taiwanese bands regularly tour the mainland at their own cost, and with or without official permission, a few Beijing bands have even made it to Taipei in recent months.
These quasi-legal gigs are perhaps emblematic of all kinds of other cultural exchanges just waiting to happen. When one Taipei rock promoter was asked about the shows, he said: 'We've known their music for a long time, but we've never had a chance to see them live. The kids here are really curious.'
