Julia Andrews (Ohio State University), John Clark (University of Sydney), Kuo-Sung Liu (artist), Mali Wu (artist)

When modernism was considered a Western artistic movement, non-Western modernisms were considered derivative or belated. When modernism was considered a global movement, non-Western modernisms acquire meaning only through their relationship, whether historical or discursive, with Western modernism. Whether we take the “multiple modernisms” approach (that there are many different modernisms around the world), or “one modernism” approach (that there is one global modernism with multiple participants from different parts of the world), non-Western modernism is routinely peripheralized or pushed into insignificance. For a Pacific island country such as Taiwan, peripheralization of its modernist art has been its enduring and persistent fate. This conference takes stock of Taiwan’s modernist art in the global context, not only in terms of the unique role it played in Asia historically, but in terms of its participation in the interconnected global art world as a co-producer of that world.