A Beautiful Cultural Map:An Interview with CCA Minister Chen Chi-nan

Q: The CCA has been promoting arts festivals and small-scale international exhibits and performances for many years now. What results have you seen from these efforts?

A: There are two main art festival activities that the CCA provides resources for:

The first is a nationwide National Festival of Culture and Arts, which is based on the unique features of different counties and cities, such as the Tainan Baihe Lotus Carnival, the Chishan Banana Festival, the Chushan Bamboo Arts Festival, and the Yutien Lion Dance Festival. Through large-scale events held every year at various counties, cities, and townships, over time every locality has been touched by cultural events. Thus while we have a "national" festival, it is really is locally oriented.

The second is the small-scale international exhibits and performances at the county and city level that were launched in 1997. These events are aimed at working with a county or city as a whole to develop their ability to hold international events and to provide opportunities for international exchange. While the roles of these two types of activity are different, both have shown strong results.

Ten years ago, when we began promoting local international exhibits and performances, almost none of the townships had any experience, and in some cases had never even held a large-scale event. At this time, many people felt that since these local areas had no experience or talent, there was no way they would be capable of holding international events. Looking at the situation now, however, it seems that these worries were misplaced.

Q: What is the CCA's model for working with local cities and counties?

A: In the early years, the CCA took the main leadership role, and the subsidies it gave out often reached NT$10 million. Currently, however, subsidies for counties and cities are only about NT$2-3 million or less.

When I served as deputy minister, the CCA was limited in some ways by concerns for events' cultural content, environmental outlook, event quality and significance for international exchange. Now, however, we have had a reversal in roles, and local governments take the lead in all areas. Because of this, too, they also barely seem to meet the CCA's original expectations in their planning and execution of events. Some themes for events, such as the Toro Fish Festival or the Tainan Candy Festival, are not that culturally oriented. These divert from the main thrust of cultural events and seem to be held for the sake of holding an event.

Some events are handed over to for-profit agencies to manage, but these rarely work to develop local talent. Many places' festivals often switch their themes and thus do not create a sense of consistency, which naturally means that they cannot gain mass appeal.

Q: Will the CCA be taking new directions in the work it is promoting?

A: In the future, the CCA will shift its emphasis to starting up nationwide events and performances. For example, the Taiwan Performing Arts Fair 2005, which was in May at Kao-hsiung's Weiwu Park, brought together handpicked groups from across the country in music, dance, and contemporary and traditional theater for three days and two nights of nonstop performances. We are also reviewing the results of this unprecedented large-scale art festival.

Taiwan has everything it needs to hold international arts festivals, but we need to keep building ourselves up, because the arts festivals in places like Avignon, France or Edinburgh, Scotland, both have half a century of experience. For the time being, then, for as long as counties and cities cannot achieve that kind of international character or quality of performances, they will have to rely on support from the CCA.

Q: With such a lively array of festivals, would you say that this is similar to or different than a previous CCA minister's idea of "culturizing industry and industrializing culture"?

A: There are some differences. "Bringing culture into industry" does not mean simply using local industry to hold events. Rather, it means valuing the cultural significance and aesthetic experience within these industries. For example, the Tainan Baihe Lotus Carnival is not just about selling lotuses and eating foods made from lotuses. It's also about the aesthetics of appreciating lotuses, the feel of drinking lotus-flower tea. This includes bringing people together to paint lotuses, recite poems and rhyme-prose about lotuses, or develop creative new foods from lotus root, or use lotus root in glazes to create unique ceramics. It even means nurturing people involved in literature and history who are interested in "lotus culture," or encouraging people to use farmland to plant lotuses and work to maintain this cultural landscape. Only when we all work together in this direction can it be called "bringing culture into industry."

Q: Right now it looks like Taiwan is virtually becoming an island of festivals. With both central and local governments heavily involved in organizing events, is it possible that this could become wasteful?

A: Such a variety of festivals and events is a trend that announces the arrival of an era of cultural consumption. From the perspective of cultural development, it's a good thing. When culture becomes something that is needed in people's lives, it is a great help to the development of culture and creativity.

This includes events for folk religions. Events such as burning incense for Mazu or the Yenshui fireworks are changing, because when modern people participate in something like the Yenshui fireworks, they're looking for fun and excitement, and do not see it as a traditional way of preventing disaster and praying for prosperity. This particular sense of pursuing experience and sensation is one characteristic of postmodern life.

What the CCA wants to concentrate on, however, is improving cultural foundations, not promoting consumer industries. Now when local governments hold events, they often set high attendance as their main goal, and just work to curry favor with audiences. But cultural development is not about following what audiences like. It is about "elevating" participants, changing what they like, and we do not necessarily need to emphasize how many or how few people participated or the monetary value of what was produced.

Q: As an anthropologist, do you feel that today's "festival industry" can give people that sense of spiritual transcendence that traditional festivals do?

A: There are many different patterns of modern life. One can say that new festivals have already replaced traditional ones, and what modern festivals can now achieve is the function of "release." In an event-based cultural era, modern people need to use their leisure time to enjoy themselves-this is a kind of lifestyle. Thus the significance of events is multiple and overlapping. All at the same time, we can learn, travel, explore, search for stimulation, and experience an environment completely different from that of our normal lives.

Q: What do you hope to see for Taiwan and its festivals?

A: Festivals based on local industries still need to get a good grasp on local culture and enable others to understand them through their events. After all, an event's quality represents a place's character and image, and it also symbolizes the locality. The better organized an event is, the more it can build pride and a sense of identification with a place. From this perspective, everyone needs to take a longer view of things. We can't be in a rush to get things done and grasp at short-lived numbers about these events.

If every place has special qualities that allow it to distinguish itself, then people in every town will create together, and that would make for a very beautiful map of Taiwan. It would not be a map that had only names, but one that also had a lotus for Baihe in Tainan, a wooden clog for Baimi in Suao, and a flower for Changhua.

That type of beautiful "cultural map" is the vision I have in my heart.