One of the challenges in bringing forth decolonial ideas to a contemporary art audience is the fact that, for many, colonial history often appears as belonging exclusively to the past. Yet, whilst many have now come to understand the dark stains this period left upon the foundations of so-called modern history, less obvious to us are the ways in which the legacies of colonialism continue to exert their influence upon the present day. As much as we might forget amidst the pleasurable rituals of its everyday consumption, for example, even a product as seemingly innocuous as tea belies direct connections to an ongoing past that are always worthy of consideration from fresh perspectives.
This was the revealing entry point deployed by a small but meaningful exhibition which took place in the special gallery of southern Taiwan’s Chiayi Art Museum earlier this year. Titled Bad Deal: Tê and Cross Border Trade (2022/12/06 – 2023/01/29), the show’s curator Ping-Ju Tsai sought to draw attention to the networks of people and objects that have long occupied a region of Asian geography rarely engaged directly within the contemporary museum space. Tracing an imaginary line along the Tropic of Cancer between two famed tea producing sites, Darjeeling in northern India and Alishan in southern Taiwan, the deceptively minimal outlay of the exhibition provided a glimpse into what is what is a vast and, at times, bewildering landscape – an area stretching ostensibly from the Himalayas of Tibet and Nepal, across China all the way to the tea growing mountains of central-southern Taiwan.
More specifically though, the exhibition sought to frame this landscape as that of the “bad deal” – a site arguably reaching far beyond these borders, where identity continues to be negotiated from within a very particular set of both historical and present-day forces. Indeed, across this territory, various displaced and transitory groups, excluded from full economic participation, struggle to maintain not just a sense of identity, but also a continuation of specific knowledge and traditions, all whilst dwelling in places previously affected by the occupying presence of colonial economy. These locations are now also postcolonial sites processing complicated pasts from within the ever-increasingly restrictive frameworks of contemporary global capitalism. The “bad deal” concerned the kinds of relationships that have emerged within these complicated settings, and offered a nuanced path toward knowing this often remote region more intimately. This was an insightful observation on the part of the curator, and the decision to use tea as an underlying thematic provided the unifying thread around which to weave together three distinct artistic imaginations, which together offered audiences a productive interpretation of what this landscape might have to offer.
Greeting viewers into this “bad deal” landscape was Shambha-la (2022), a two-metre-long, shimmering dark green Tibetan welcome mat, produced collectively by staff at the Tibetan Self-help Refugee Centre in Darjeeling, India. Suspended from the rafters of the gallery’s loft-like space, at the centre of the piece, nestled safely in the mountains, was a serene and heavenly palace, surrounded by trees and shrouded in a ring of protective cloud. This was a seemingly simplified depiction of Shambhala, a Buddhist concept conveying a sense of the “ideal place”, here a utopic symbol of persistence, representing the aspiration of its makers to one day return to their Tibetan homeland. Whilst the image itself could be said to be a fine contemporary example of traditional Tibetan symbolic imagery, what was most striking were the colours involved. The dyes applied to the carpet’s hand-woven weavings to achieve its luscious green border, and the various whites, reds, blues, greys, golds and oranges of the temple itself, were all fabricated from natural pigmentations. For visitors more used to seeing the mass-produced colours of everyday life, these caught the eye in refreshingly unfamiliar ways, emanating a sense of calmness and hope that stood at odds with the notion of the “bad deal” as it first appeared in the exhibition’s title.
In the context of the show, this was an important distinction. The “bad deal” being dealt with here was a somewhat more nuanced notion than simply critiquing the defects within present-day modes of capital. The exhibition wished instead to turn attention towards what Tsai referred to as being “another support system that helps and develops alongside the existing system.” This “unofficial” life support network, often referred to as the informal economy, is one that has continued to shape and adapt across multiple, interconnected histories and geographies, both because of and in spite of more formal networks, in order to care for those left out of mainstream means of production. It is a system which serves as a way to enhance limited economic value whilst at the same time offering possibilities for maintaining a sense of continued identity.
An example of this is provided through the background of those who came together to produce the work Shambha-la. Many of the staff at the Tibetan Refugee Self-help Centre arrived in Darjeeling from Tibet after the Tibetan uprising of 1959, with other members being born there following this exodus. One of the main routes to safety was the Tea Horse Road, a pre-colonial tea trading route once comparable to the better-known Eurasian Silk Road trade routes. According to the curator’s research, along this route, which ran from Sichuan and Yunnan in China right into present-day Kalimpong, many properties exist that had been previously acquired by Tibetan aristocrats, and were later handed over to other ethnic groups for management. Contact between these groups over time has shaped the unique character of this exiled community: a multi-ethnic coexistence that, to some extent, has retained the influence of its aristocratic origins and created a distinction from the broader exiled Tibetan community. The skills and knowledge passed on at the centre – the “self-help” – thus help to sustain a way of everyday life in exile by selling these products to a mass market, and serve as a way to maintain the knowledge and identity of a very particular group of Tibetans living under a very specific set of conditions in northern India.
Offering a more contemplative feel for how we might imagine ourselves within this abstruse topography, was Taiwanese artist Tsung-Hsun Tsai with his multi-layered work Circle Round (2022). A piece about humans, plants, and dwelling, the work revolved around the narrative of mountains, here providing gentle reflection upon the connective elements present throughout the “bad deal” landscape, and an example of how such elements bring a distinct aesthetic sense to these spaces. Placed directly behind Shambha-la, a roofless and sideless hut, with a single back wall, filled most of the middle section of the gallery. Inside were five small tables, where visitors could sit reading diary-like entries about the artist’s research for this exhibition. Next to these tables, on the inside wall, four skillfully hand-drawn pencil sketchings of looping, knotted ropes alluded to the artist’s musings on the overlapping mountain trails winding around the Tropic of Cancer – paths that through movement afford countless possibilities for random encounter and the sharing of stories. The outside of the hut’s wall, covered entirely by a photographed print of a jagged mountain ravine, was juxtaposed with the inclusion of a further small, close-up sketching of a ruffled duvet. The amazingly similar contours visible in these two disproportionately sized images momentarily blurring the line between the vast outside landscapes through which we roam and the much more intimate inside spaces in which we take shelter. This hut was one such shelter, a place to gather and share stories, but also only a temporary site, lacking any grounded sense of something we might be able to call a home.
Tsai Tsung-Hsun, Circle Round (2022), woodwork, carpet, text, printing, drawing, dimensions variable. Photo by Photo by TSAI Ping-Ju.
If these themes seemed a little too abstract, two deft touches brought the work into more direct contact with the exhibition’s more direct lines of inquiry. The first of these concerned the artist’s diary entries left upon the tables inside Circle Round’s hut-like abode. Some of these were snapshots of time the artist spent working with migrant workers in Taiwan. These entries were fleeting, detailing a number of unnamed figures. But despite the apparently unidentifiable nature of each individual character, read in unison, a sense of cohesion emerged. Here was another displaced group in contemporary conditions negotiating inside a “bad deal” landscape. Taiwan is also a country that has experienced more than its own fair share of colonial pain and, if it had not done so already, here, the “bad deal” concept emerged as a useful artistic metaphor for examining the dynamic sets of relations at play that exist between these two different groups. In this small gallery space, a barely recognisable link had been brought to light between two seemingly distant groups. The refugees living at the Self-help Centre in Darjeeling, who must continue to negotiate their ongoing position in a postcolonial Indian state, and the many Southeast Asian migrant workers living in a Taiwan, also a postcolonial country, that Taiwanese scholar, Kuan-hsing Chen, might describe as still possessing a certain degree of post-Cold War subimperial desire.
The second of these deft touches concerned a final section of Circle Round, placed opposite the hut’s temporary facade upon the gallery wall itself. Here were three further highly detailed design-like sketches, one of which appeared to show a greenhouse, inside of which a man-made mountain trail led off through some form of subtropical forest. For the exhibition’s curator, this image was comparable to a Wardian Case, a colonial piece of equipment – essentially a small, portable greenhouse – which was used for the temporary transportation of exotic fauna, not only from periphery to centre, but, in the case of potentially lucrative cash crops such as tea, from one already colonised site to other places where they might be deployed as a means for further colonial expansion. It was the invention of the Wardian case which allowed the British to transport tea plants from China to India starting in the 1830s, breaking the Chinese monopoly on the trade of this plant, and establishing India as a major colonial tea producing site.
The transportation of tea across this landscape also established a connection with the exhibition’s third and final work, Kuei-Pi Li’s ongoing Formosa Tea House (2022), a piece examining the class consciousness symbolised by tea-drinking culture at world-shaping events such as colonial expositions. Situated in the back of the gallery, a two-part video was looped onto a large screen, with two much smaller framed colour prints placed just to the screen’s right-hand side. The first of these videos traced the trajectory of these emergent class politics through an imagined dialogue between two “smugglers” on the Island of Jersey, an island located between the UK and France, well-known for its history of smuggling during the 18th century, and today as a financial tax haven for wealthy elites. As the audio played against a black background, the screen displayed the white subtitled text of a conversation between two characters, one an 18th century British tea smuggler, the other a present-day financial advisor, as they exchanged details of the ways in which they assisted their “clients” in circumnavigating the impositions of more official trading systems.
Suspended in darkness, seemingly removed of any meaningful context, the words of these two unlikely conversational partners offered insight into the gradual shifting of proletarian class struggle into a more aspirational, and politically malleable, form of middle-class desire. Whilst the tea smuggler spoke of crossing borders, and the importance of freedom for all, the financial advisor felt that only qualified experts had the right to control the spaces in between, believing in a more authoritarian notion of “the greater good”. Of course, it was only against a backdrop of colonial economy that such a history was able to develop, and both characters seemed to be unaware of the outward effects of their endeavours. As if to acknowledge this, the artist added two further subtle details. Beneath the subtitles, waves could be seen, ever-present beneath the words being spoken, and in the background, was the sound of the ocean, serving as a reminder of distant connections reaching far beyond the seemingly intimate nature of this candid encounter.
Following these ocean currents back towards Asia, the artist linked them to the Formosan Tea House, a Japanese display of “Taiwanese tea culture” staged at colonial expositions in San Francisco in 1916 and Kota Semarang in Indonesia in 1914. Of the two framed images next to the large screen, the first showed an archival colour print, with what appeared to be two middle-class Japanese figures posing for a photo outside the Tea House in San Francisco. Next to this, a 3D rendering produced by the artist displayed the same structure suspended in architectural white space, highlighting the fact that this building was reproduced and exported by the Japanese to multiple world fairs as a way to promote its colonial tea industry in Taiwan during the height of its imperial ambitions.
Li Kuei-Pi, Formosa Tea House (2022), video, sound, photo, dimensions variable. Photo by Photo by TSAI Ping-Ju.
World fairs were important events during the colonial period. Taking place from the late-19th to the early-20th century in imperial centres, they acted both as ways to boost trade between competing imperial nations, and also as a way to sell the benefits of colonial plunder to the growing middle-classes of the home nations. Displays such as the Formosa Tea House were idealised examples of so-called “exotic” cultures, distilled and simplified for the enjoyment of an aspiring bourgeoisie, eager to experience new developments brought back from the peripheries. Li’s carefully selected image here reminded viewers that these kinds of displays of power were not limited exclusively to Europe and North America. This was a representation of Japanese imperialism, transporting tea, and idealised versions of its surrounding culture, in an attempt to emulate British colonial economy in that region, leaving traces on the ground that would become just as vital as those left by the British and other colonial powers in the eventual formation of the “bad deal” landscape.
One figure whose influence over this process Li sought to highlight was a Chinese-Japanese colonialist named Kure Daiguro, also known as Wu Da-wu-lang, a former code breaker who had helped the Japanese win the First Sino-Japanese War. After the brief intertitle “We arrived in Paradise” the second part of Formosa Tea House’s two-part video began with an animation. A 3D rendering of the eponymous tea house gradually appeared, replicating the construction of middle-class ideals this structure aimed to project onto the world. Behind this idea was Kure, who had suggested turning Taiwan into Japan’s Darjeeling at the beginning of Taiwan’s Japanese colonisation in 1895. After the video’s opening animation, the camera gently lingered in the empty spaces of a real-life tea house in northern Taiwan, one eerily similar to those built for Japan’s world fair displays. Over these images, which hinted at the lasting effects Kure’s visions of tea-based utopia have left upon the island, a female voice narrated the piece by reading a letter in Japanese. Dispatched to the 1915 expo in San Francisco to view her much older lover’s imperial achievements, this fictional middle-aged woman couldn’t help but idealise Kure’s apparent successes. Despite the fact that the seeds for the tea trees that launched this colonial project may actually have come from Nepal and Tibet, not Darjeeling, this Formosan Tea House was full and its tea was being enjoyed by many satisfied visitors at reasonable prices. For the narrator, it was a sign that Kure’s belief in imitating and adapting the experience of colony from other empires would allow Japan to produce its own model colony in Taiwan and beyond. The establishing of desirable middle-class spaces through tea drinking culture was seen as being integral to this process – what could be referred to perhaps as a somewhat more mass-produced and regulated version of the “ideal place”.
In the end then, this was the landscape which Tsai wished to present – a multidimensional site in which past actions continue to have ongoing effects. If the first two works offered an example of a “bad deal” landscape in which certain groups must negotiate a vastly complex postcolonial terrain in order to maintain a continued sense of self-identity, Li’s work provided a layered and imaginative historical context to these sites, extending the boundaries of this territory in surprising directions. The concept of the “bad deal”, through the examples of Darjeeling’s Tibetan refugees and Taiwan’s Southeast Asian migrant workers, raised questions regarding the ongoing status of the transborder body in postcolonial sites. At the same time, Formosa Tea Room, through its exploration of shifting class politics and the emergent middle-class desires detectable in colonial tea-drinking practices, offers one possible way of understanding how such sites have come into existence. Even so, this is a place that offers no obvious answers. Indeed, given that this particular region has featured so rarely within the realms of critical discourse, perhaps this should not be so surprising. Yet, as this small exhibition so skillfully demonstrated, there is much to be learnt here if the right questions are asked, and it would be desirable to see this project given a larger framework in which to develop. There is obvious scope for interdisciplinary sharing, and of course it is a project that could well lead to multi-site exhibitions in locations throughout the “bad deal” landscape that might provide more constructive ways to platform more of the many groups inhabiting this region.
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John Stephenson is a freelance writer and reviewer.
Main Image Credit: Tibetan Refugee Self-help Centre, Shambha-la (2022), wool, dye, 251 x 116 cm. Photo by TSAI Ping-Ju.
