City of Yearning: Space, Time, and Movement in Turn of the 21st Century Taipei —Summer 2024 - Present
Skills:
Mandarin Chinese
Zine Design
Map Storytelling
Drawing
Research
This is the zine and research paper for my honors thesis, “City of Yearning: Space, Time, and Movement in Turn of the 21st Century Taipei.” I was selected as a recipient for the $9000 Stanford VPUE Independent Research Grant, wherein I spent a summer in Taipei traversing urban landscapes, analyzing historical archives, and watching films depicting 1990s-2000s Taipei. Here is some of my work.
Advised by Ato Quayson and Ban Wang
Queue the theme song of my project, a song I chose by Changin’ My Life, an early 2000s J-pop band. Here, I pay homage to Japanese media influence and globalization in 90s/00s Taipei!
Zine
V1 Draft of Zine Title Page
V1 Draft of Example Zine Content Page
Thesis
Abstract
In 1987, President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in Taiwan, ending a 38-year-long consecutive period of Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist military rule. As a result, Taiwan experienced a period of massive change in the 1990s and 2000s: urbanization, democratization, and globalization occurred simultaneously and rapidly in Taipei, the national capital. Through developments in entertainment spaces, housing, and infrastructure, the experience of space and time in Taipei fundamentally transformed.
This project seeks to understand Taipei at the turn of the millennium by conducting close readings of three films directed by Taiwanese Second New Wave filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮): Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒, 1992), Vive L’Amour (愛情萬歲, 1994), and What Time Is It There? (你那邊幾點, 2001). Combining urban studies and media studies analytical frameworks, I read these films alongside relevant books and films, as well as relevant urban policies and historical policies.
I argue that as rapid economic, political, and infrastructural developments disrupted notions of space and time in 1990s and 2000s Taipei, individuals engaged in asynchronous parallelism, a process where people may have been disconnected in terms of space and time, but still found ways to engage with urban transformations and creatively yearn for connection. Studying Taipei through asynchronous parallelism allows us to understand urbanization not only as its material developments in time and space (e.g. the introduction of leisure locations, a boom in the housing market, the removal of a skywalk), but also as creative and emotional engagements with time and space (e.g. going to an arcade after dark, squatting in a luxury apartment, using a dual time clock). It also allows us to understand Taipei beyond a location of urban alienation and disillusionment with rapid change; in my thesis, I show that Taipei at the turn of the 21st century was a city of yearning, desire, and even hope.
Excerpt: Map Annotations of Ximending (西門町), used to historically contextualize the neighborhood wherein Rebels of the Neon God (1992) was set
1895 map showcasing Taipei’s Qing city walls and gates, titled “Map of Taipei City, Taiwan” (Taiwan Taibei Cheng Zhi Tu 臺灣臺北城之圖). Annotations of city gates made by Camille Luong. (Original map from National Taiwan University)
1983 Taipei City Administrative Area Map, (Taibeishi Hang Zheng Quyu Tu, 臺北市行政區域圖) Annotations of city gates and Ximending made by Camille Luong. (Original map from Academia Sinica)