Visual Arts Library
Taiwan-Guernica
Artist: Shih-fan Cheng
Date:
1995
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 53 x 60 cm
Event: Chinese History
Motif:
Remembrance
Cheng Shifan lived through what is known as the "2/28 Incident" of 1947, when efforts by the newly-installed Nationalist Chinese government to suppress protests by the native Taiwanese population turned violent. The event is featured explicitly in the work Taiwan-Guernica, created almost a half a century after the incident. When the artist created this work in 1995, it was during a time of renewed calls for Taiwanese independence and the erosion of "mainlander" power. It had also only recently become possible in Taiwan to speak openly about the "2/28 Incident." Modest in scale and relatively simple in pictorial conception, the painting succeeds in invoking Picasso's famous Guernica convincingly, something a more ambitious painting might not have been able to do. At the same time, the painting's vivid immediacy abolishes the temporal distance from the event, indirectly evoking the role of memory over the intervening period. -- Jonathan Hay
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