The Taiwanese Cultural Association and the Roaring Twenties

Formerly the Taipei North Police Station during Japan­ese rule, a two-story building at the junction of Ningxia Road and Jinxi Street in Taipei’s Datong District has been transformed into the Taiwan New Cultural Movement Memor­ial Museum. This site recounts the part played by the Taiwan Cultural Association (TCA) in a key chapter in the history of the Taiwanese cultural movement.

At the Taiwan New Cultural Movement Memorial Museum, the story of the TCA begins with this photo of the first meeting of its board of directors.

A century later: Revisiting Dadaocheng

With the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, Taiwan was ceded from Qing-Dynasty China to Japan. The Japanese promoted colonial-style modernization, constructing transport, education and public health systems. Over the next few decades Taiwan would be exposed to the ideas of national self-determination, Japan’s liberal­­izing Taisho Democracy Movement, and Korea’s March 1st Movement in pursuit of autonomy. As Taiwan opened to the world, support began to grow for reforms to build an ideal society and enable the pursuit of a better life.

In 1921, Taiwanese students in Japan rallied to campaign for  a Taiwanese parliament, as part of their struggle for autonomy and democracy. In Taiwan itself, a group of young people who had received a modern education pondered how to overcome Taiwanese people’s status as second-class citizens under Japanese coloniza­tion. Accordingly, Chiang Wei-shui, Lin Hsien-tang and others founded the TCA, which was based in the Da­dao­cheng district of Taipei, the era’s most progressive and prosperous commun­ity. (The district’s name has been variously spelled in English as Twatutia or Tua-tiu-tiann, based on Taiwanese Hokkien pronunci­ation; Daitōtei, based on Japan­ese; and Ta­tao­cheng or Dadaocheng, based on Mandarin.)

Old TCA photos tell the story of “cultural enlightenment” in those days. (courtesy of Chiang Wei-shui‘s Cultural Foundation)

Taiwan’s uniqueness

Many people today think of Dadaocheng as a nostal­gic, retro district of Taipei, but Jou Yi-cheng, CEO of the Sedai Group, who located here in 2008 to develop a micro­enterprise startup hub, asserts that “Dadaocheng represents an era of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The key to Dadaocheng’s emergence was international trade. Under the terms of the Treaty of Tientsin, in 1862 the Qing opened the nearby port of Tamsui to commerce, and consulates and foreign trading companies took up residence. Dadaocheng went global by selling tea, and Western­ization was rapid too. Everything that was progres­sive, fashionable and novel gathered here, and ­Chiang Wei-shui’s Da’an Hospital also opened in the district. Da­dao­cheng naturally became the birthplace of the TCA.

It was a time of great prosperity and a sparkling ambience. Jou Yi-cheng notes how the lyrics of the TCA’s official song, penned by Chiang Wei-shui, affirm that Taiwan had been “assigned a grand and divine mission”—“to link all the peoples of East Asia into a great alliance,” and thereby “avoid a war between the yellow and white races.” He describes Chiang as an optimistic idealist. The lyrics em­phas­ize the special nature of Taiwanese society and advocate that ­residents should be globalists brimming with inter­national­ist thinking. “But before and after Chiang Wei-shui, the fate of the Taiwanese people was bleak, which highlights that the 1920s represent a unique stage in Taiwan’s history.”

Birth of the TCA

Such was the era in which the association was born, and its activities were rich and touched on many domains. In Japan, over a 14-year period the association conducted 15 campaigns calling for the establishment of a Taiwanese parliament. In Taiwan, physician Chiang Wei-shui applied his diagnostic skills to Taiwanese society and determined it to be suffering from “knowledge mal­nutrition.” To provide the appropriate remedies, association members undertook to raise their fellow citizens’ cultural consciousness, employing simple, easily grasped methods to transmit knowledge. Literacy was not widespread, so they created newspaper clubs to read reports aloud to the public, sponsored lectures on culture, organ­ized summer schools, and set up a club to screen films across the island.

In the association’s first seven years (1921-1927), many Taiwanese benefited from these efforts. “According to official statistics, the association counted more than 1000 members,” says Tsai Hui-pin, a librarian at the National Taiwan Library. “But with a population of 4 million, the power of a thousand people could mobilize the whole of Taiwan, so the association’s influence was far-reaching.”

“At the time, most association members had received a thorough Japanese education, but they didn’t want their compatriots to forget they were Taiwanese, in spite of assimilation by the Japanese,” explains Tsai.

Therefore, on the one hand the TCA engaged in cultural enlightenment work, while on the other it sought to focus discussion on how Taiwan could serve as a bridge between China and Japan. Nowadays, the Taiwan New Cultural Movement Memorial Museum hopes to become a bridge for communication between generations. Museum director Hsu Mei-hui explains that by curating interesting and lively exhibi­tions, the museum hopes to ensure that visitors go beyond merely learning the basic facts of the TCA’s history and gain an under­standing of the geo­graphical and historical context in which it existed.

The building that housed the Taipei North Police Station during Japanese rule has been transformed into the Taiwan New Culture Movement Memorial Museum.

Supporting the arts

The current exhibition Vanguards of an Emerging Identity: A Century of Artistic Power at the Taiwan Cultural Associ­ation in Taichung, curated by Lin Chen-ching at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, is dedicated to the TCA’s centennial. “This group of people in the association not only strived for the cultural advancement of the Taiwanese,” says the curator. “They were also unsung heroes in the promotion of new art in Taiwan.”

Similarly to how the Medici family sponsored artists behind the scenes during the European Renaissance, in the 1920s there were bodies such as Central Bookstore and entre­preneurs like Lin Hsien-tang and Yang Chao-chia that quietly supported artists financially, so that they could devote themselves to competing in art salons.

By meticulously sifting through the fragmentary historical record, Lin Chen-ching learned that Lin Hsien-tang personally sponsored a number of artists, including Chen Chih-chi, Yen Shui-long, Kuo Hsueh-hu and Li Shih-chiao.

Yang Chao-chia, a Taichung-born member of the gentry class, had more diverse interests ranging from music, literature and art to sports and aviation, and he became a bulwark for artists. “At that time, art patronage was not for the purpose of investment," explains Lin Chen-ching. “Buying their tableaux back then was tantamount to throwing money away.” In that era there existed a group of people who were willing to contribute quietly for the “collective good,” which was really admirable, he adds.

Chang Hsin-chien, then manager of Central Bookstore, is described by Lin as a matchmaker, playing the role of the savvy agent and organizing exhibitions on a voluntary basis. The bookstore became an outpost for artists in Central Taiwan, a virtual “cultural dynamo.”

Having discovered that prestige gained in the art world was more likely to attract society’s attention, these patrons sponsored art and raised the reputation of art juries as a means to fight for the dignity of the Taiwanese people and prove that they could stand on an equal footing with the Japanese.

What has the association left to Taiwan in the century since its genesis? “In addition to the germination of Taiwan’s identity, fine arts on the island depended on the dedication of TCA members to ensure that an earlier genera­tion of artists could innovate without pause both prior to World War II and thereafter, thereby accumulating a rich heritage of Taiwanese art. This was an un­deni­able contribution of the TCA,” opines Lin.

Tsai Hui-pin (left) and Hsu Mei-hui (right) point out that the debate about “Taiwan consciousness” raised by the TCA in the 1920s is still a hot topic today.

Foundations of Taiwanese consciousness

What did the youthful fervor of the association’s members of a century ago bequeath to modern Taiwan?

Drawn by the “spirit of the 1920s,” Jou Yi-cheng came to Dadaocheng to build a startup incubator for micro­enterprises. He invited youthful teams to move in and create an economic network by commingling with existing enterprises, crafting the ArtYard, which comprises business spaces housed in renovated historic buildings, to bring a fresh ambience to the old streets of Dadaocheng.

Tsai Hui-pin of the National Taiwan Library analyzes the TCA‘s approach from an academic point of view. “The first thing was ‘pursuit of internal reform,’ a line that has never been abandoned in Taiwan.” The bloodless revolu­tion­ary line supported by Lin Hsien-tang was the product of the struggle of his forerunners and the lessons of history. “The quest to improve Taiwan’s political status and achieve its democratization is also something that has not changed over the past 100 years,” she asserts.

The pioneers of the association also generated a wave of questions that remain contentious today: “Who is Taiwan­ese? And what is Taiwanese culture? Petitioning for a Taiwanese parliament raised the issue of determining who could vote and who could stand as a candidate, which would inevitably have touched upon the question of who is Taiwanese,” explains museum director Hsu Mei-hui.

“To use a current buzzword, it’s a ‘rolling correction.’ We’ve been debating who is Taiwanese for a hundred years, and the concept keeps evolving,” says Tsai Hui-pin.

On closer examination, we are surprised to find that in fact, even 100 years ago the Taiwanese were aware of the special characteristics of their culture, as well their yearning to be part of a “global society” and the geographical advant­ages they possessed for doing so.

Today, at the 100th anniversary of the TCA’s founding, we should reexamine the questions left by our pre­deces­sors, and take a broader view of Taiwan’s role and position in order to understand our relationship with Southeast Asia and the world, comments Tsai.

At this moment of the centennial, as we reexamine the past, contemplate the present, and look to the future, what we can look forward to is another generation of cultural flourishing.                 

The stage play A Difficult Birth harnesses the time-travel genre to prompt audiences to ponder the TCA’s historical significance. (courtesy of Taiwan New Cultural Movement Memorial Museum)

Vanguards of an Emerging Identity: A Century of Artistic Power at the Taiwan Cultural Association in Taichung, curated by Lin Chen-ching, reveals TCA members’ role as a driving force behind new art in Taiwan. (courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts)

Via a 21st-century start-up in the historic district of Dadaocheng, Jou Yi-cheng is putting into practice the inspiration he draws from the Taiwan of the Roaring Twenties. (courtesy of Sedai Group)

The saga of the Taiwan Cultural Association needs to be constantly retold, so that each new generation can appreciate its key role in Taiwan’s “cultural enlightenment.” Pictured is the exhibition A Century of Heartfelt Sentiment: 100th Anniversary of the Taiwan Cultural Association, at the National Taiwan Museum of Literature. (photo by Kent Chuang)