Replying on this strategy, we have categorized postwar Taiwanese sound culture under several sound making narratives, which are reflected by five areas in the exhibition venue.
Governance and Gaps
The political background of Taiwan's sound culture is introduced in this area. During the martial law period, the power elite implemented strict cultural governance of Taiwanese popular music, which included censoring and monitoring songs and regulating radio frequencies and publishing. Anglo-American popular music escaped censors, which was due in part to the presence of the United States Taiwan Defense Command and also the fact that the KMT endorse the connotation of modern life that was inherent in this globally popular music. This gap in culture American music as the image of modern sound for Taiwanese youths.
Sound Excavation
In 1966 Hsu Tsang-houei and Shin Wei-liang started the Folksong Collecting Movement, which was a response to the oft-heard question at the time: Do we need our own music? One repercussion of the movement was that Taipei intellectual circles became interested in the work of Chen Da, a folksinger from Hengchun in southern Taiwan. Even though Chen became an important topic of cultural discourse, Taiwan's record industry, which promoted mostly songs sung in Mandarin Chinese, paid little attention to this singer from the grassroot. It was not until martial law ended in 1987 that a new wave of nativist/indigenizing movements tried to associate themselves with Chen Da and address concerns raised by Hsu Tsang-houei and Shih Wei-liang.
Alter-native Sound
When Li Shuang-tze asked, "Where are our songs?" during a concert in 1976, it was already clear that singing is not purely a question of music. Songs can also be about social movements and political sound making. In this area of the exhibition, we narrate the history of Li Shuang-tze and Yang Tsu-chuen, leftist political movements and bands during the post martial law period, and the forced closure of the livehouse music performance venue called Underworld. A sub-theme in this area is about aboriginal people singing their own songs in the context of Taiwan's mainstream Han Chinese culture.
Alter-native Flight
The idea of bodily escape from martial law discipline had already begun brewing in the early 1980s with the first instances of performance are and Taiwan's fringe theater movement. After abrogation of martial law, physical rebellion and escape gradually reached its acme, and included a series of public demonstrations by the Noise Movement and raves, which were seen as social events or cultural phenomena making evolution.
Alter-native Art
Around the year 2000, the term sound art started being used in Taiwan, which expanded possibilities and dialectics regarding sound making. Variety within sound practice increased and became an alternate art form with respect to discourses and sound experiments. This area introduces Etat Lab, who had focused and comprehensively documented the development and performance such as Lacking Sound Festival, Kandala Commune and Huang Dawang.
In addition to historical documentation, the exhibition also presents the video, sound art, installation art and paintings of Chang Chao-tang, Chen Chieh-jeh, Chu Yueh-hsin, Yannick Dauby, Floaty, Huang Dawang, Wang Ming-hui, Wang Fujui, Yao Jui-chung, Etat Lab, Kandala Commune and Lacking Sound Festival. More than merely testifying to, or supplementing the historical narratives, and the artists are all sound creators who have themselves excavated different art forms.
The sound making genealogy and each turning point in excavation presented in the exhibition are both real and imaginary. Although we are making reference to Attali's concepts of noise and power here, we do not completely identify with the course he mapped out from examining western history. After all, it would be unrealistic to try and understand our own culture through a western context, and we hope to revise the social relations we identified in sound making from looking at our own history. Furthermore, we do not wish to suggest that the exhibition is comprehensive in its presentation of Taiwanese sound culture history, but rather an attitude for listening carefully to and interpreting Taiwanese sound. As the researcher of music culture, Ho Ying-yi has written in her preface to the first issue of Taiwan Sound, "This attitude is a belief that sound is a part of history. The People can be the writers of history, which is a recorded imbued with many interwoven levels of sound and life, sound and people, and sound and society. "We hope this exhibition carries forward this attitude transforms what history had taught us through the perception of sound, and serves as a starting point for some lively discussion.
