Standing here, we gaze at one another: humanity and landscape, light and history, love and hope, dreams and the future.... Separated by time, we preserve moments of Taiwan’s past in our memories.
As we put together this month’s cover story, “Documenting Taiwan,” we strove to select from among the rare, treasured moments that have washed down through time to the present. Ordinary strolls around the island turned into explorations of Taiwan’s primeval self as we sought to capture individual perspectives and unique highlights as a way to document our island, Formosa.
Standing here, greeting each moment with pen and lens, hands welcoming and hearts longing for them to stay, we try to fix these moments in place to give ourselves a chance savor them slowly and carefully. Time, however, slips through our grasp and flows on, bearing with it every event that has ever occurred. We nonetheless seek to capture all those things time has carried away, to collect and preserve them in words and images. The six viewpoints in “Documenting Taiwan” chronicle Taiwan through the ages. Though clearly personal accounts, we see in them aspects of the broader Formosan legacy, and we can squeeze through the window they provide to explore that legacy more deeply.
Standing here, on this piece of land surrounded by the sea, Taiwan Panorama is attempting to crack open a doorway, using sound, images, text and pictures to offer glimpses into the island’s innermost patterns and customs, and into the feelings of those living here and abroad. We know that every interview write-up and every record is an amalgamation of pieces of memory and reality, contrasting and complementing one another. What we seek in our reporting is an instant that can be seen, heard and loudly proclaimed from some corner of the island.
As luck would have it, in this issue we also introduce four brilliant individuals: painter Huang Kuang-nan, Balinese dancer Ni Ketut Juni Artini, Hakka singer Lo Sirong and Vietnamese documentary film director Nguyen Kim Hong. Quietly struggling to express their personal brilliance and shape their eras, each has striven to attain their dreams. Reading about them offers moments of supreme joy. They have attained towering heights by staying rooted in their own hearts.
Standing here, we can’t help but recognize that the documenting of moments always comes to an end, even if we haven’t written all we would like. But a period is not a conclusion. After all, many glorious futures are still unfolding here on our lovely island.
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