Kantian approach to Taiwanese local color

The problem of 'local color' as defined and defended above is an interesting task for Kantian aesthetics. Kant stresses universality, his philosophy is meant to be for any autonomous rational subject, not necessary human. At first it seems that such a scale leaves not much place for 'local color'. How is something like local color possible for Kant? If it is possible, is local color a beauty, as defined in the Critique of the Power of

Judgment, and if it is, then how is it a beauty and of what kind?

First of all, it is necessary to stress that the fact that beauty for Kant is something for autonomous rational subjects in general does not mean these subjects have no body, no native culture and no locality where this native culture resides and develops its 'local color'. Society plays a considerable role in Kantian aesthetics through the link to morality. Kantian morality is duty based and we have duties towards others whom a rational subject is supposed to view always also as an end. Then in the aesthetics of local color rational subjects are represented as an end in a way open to free play. It can be Kantian ideal of beauty – the human figure as a representation and incorporation of reason, but local color is too specific for that. It is not only an incorporation of human reason in general, but of one of its empirical emanations. Figures in the paintings by local colorists are usually dressed in local traditional ways. They show a particular case, how human reason develops in specific climate and geography. So it is not just an incorporation of reason in general, but representation of, say, ‘Taiwanese reason’ or

‘French reason’. Just as language sets a unique mindset, climate and geography also deeply influence human cultures. Through an attempt to depict such ‘reasons’ of humanity local color has an element of the ideal of beauty (Ideal des Schönen). It is the highest point of the local color aesthetics. There are many cases when such a lofty aim is unfulfilled. For example, cases of prejudice in local color, no matter whether they are

positive or negative.

The Kantian ideal of beauty is not about plants or houses, but about the human being (rational beings) alone (5: 233). It means something much more complicated than the commonsensical idea of ideal. It is not a winner of a beauty contest, but idea to be created by every agent herself. It is a priori limited to the representation of reason, because rationality supersedes sensitivity. This superiority comes from the fact that it does not matter, how intensive a feeling encounters our sensual organ, reason always can imagine a more intensive one.

But, how reason can be represented? Charles Darwin (1809-1882) writes how facial expressions related to thinking come from more mundane things: lowered eyebrows of a thinker probably an echo of the mechanism of our sight to perceive a distant object despite the sun shining.³²⁴ These eyebrows just give the eyes more protection from light, even if the sunshine of thinkers is only a metaphysical vagueness.

But when these features, these exterior signs of thinking are represented to the observer, like in Rodin's The Thinker, it produces a mixed feeling. On the one hand the viewer can enjoy the forms, on the other he can recognize something in that artwork. The Thinker is like a portrait of everyone who ever has experienced a thought. Local color is different from The Thinker in a scale, it is a portrait of everyone in a particular location, not of a human in general.

The Thinker is somehow limited: not any rational agent will feel thinking in its

indirect signs of the human species, but only the kind of rational agent who has human features. Kant often wanders about extraterrestrial, non human reason³²⁵ and it seems that for such a reason The Thinker will not belong to the ideal of beautiful. Even if a non

324 Darwin's idea is given here as it is presented in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2005), Phenomenology of Perception, (tr) Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge, p. 225.

325 Immanuel Kant (2009), ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ in Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide, (eds) Amélie O. Rorty and James Schmidt, Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, pp. 11-12 and p. 16.

human rational agent will learn that humans think with eyebrows down, eyebrows of

The Thinker will not infect such a viewer the same way, as it infects the

eyebrows-down-thinkers. The thinker creates in human beings effect like synaesthetic pain³²⁶ (a modern word for the universal communicability of the state of a soul (die allgemeine Mitteilungsfähigkeit des Gemütszustandes)) and such effect requires the same organs of the same function.

For local color aesthetics Kant generates a special challenge: can an artist communicate through his art culturally specific form of rationality to someone without knowledge of this rationality? When Kant writes on the ideal of beauty, he says that it is a representation adequate to the idea (5: 232). In the case of the ideal of beauty it is the idea of reason. For Kant, we have this idea a priori, and by being born and formed in some culture we also have something like this in regard of this culture. In other words, the human reason and human culture mutually create each other.³²⁷

Just like The Thinker, local color is not only a portrait, it is still some sensual representation we can try to see as an adequate to the idea of the locality we have. It can be what Kant's call a normal idea: we have seen a thousand Taiwanese villages, and can have a ready average image. Something a tired traveler can try to express in English idiom 'seen one, seen them all'. But The tranquil village by young Li Mei-shu cuts much deeper into the experience of Taiwanese villages. Li understands the village from the inside. It is not just 'seen one, seen them all' village or A tranquil village. Some quality, expressed also in a definite article (The village), is present. A traveler tired of 'seen one, seen them all'-villages will not be able to plan one such village. But The tranquil village

326 A synaesthetic pain is a pain one feels while observes the signs of a someone else in pain. It is a phenomenon close to a phantom limb, see Fitzgibbona, Bernadette M., Giummarraa, Melita J., Georgiou-Karistianisa, Nellie, Enticottb, Peter G., Bradshaw, John L. (2010), ‘Shared pain: From empathy to synaesthesia’ in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 34.

327 Foucault elaborates on this problem in his conception of historical a priori, which can be helpful for the further research on local color à la Kantian aesthetics.

gives the observer material to reconstruct how Taiwanese village should look. Some reasons are represented: the size of the tilled land in comparison to the number of the houses, not so many windows to protect from the heat and insects, choice of materials and the sizes and proportions of the buildings, and so on.

There is one more effect a Kantian aesthetician can detect in local color. It is a complicated effect and some time is needed to describe it. Local color generates an unique interplay between what Kant calls adherent and free beauties. Adherent beauty for Kant is a beauty not free from a function.³²⁸ Free beauty is what theory of art sees, since Kant, in the aesthetic pleasure. Free beauty is a pure contemplation of something, without the question of possession or of reality. The experience of free beauty will not lose anything in case if this experience is illusory, hallucinatory or imaginary. Adherent beauty in local color related to the identity represented, free beauty moment is related to how we fit to our environment. Free beauty's moment is also based on the element of natural beauty local colorist tries to show. Taiwanese local color has such characteristic, as any other local color tradition.³²⁹ In The tranquil village, unlike Washing clothes by late Li, traces of time are visible, all farmhouse are not new, they seem to be old and deeply sunburnt. Earth is tilled open, showing traces of hard human work in numerous

328 Xue Yan-ling admits this 'adherentness' in some of local color artworks when he writes that Taiwanese local color does not belong to 'pure beauty' ('純粹性美'), see Xue Yan-ling (2004), Rizhi shiqi Taiiwan meishu di diyu secai, Taichung:

Guoli Taiwan meishuguan. http://taiwaneseart.ntmofa.gov.tw/b3_3.html (accessed online on the 5th of June, 2018).

Although he expresses mainly a political concern. To Xue this art is impure because of colonial oppression by the Japanese. But from the point of view of the critical philosophy, this impurity is of the same kind: it stems from the identity building, and at the bottom it does not matter, is it an identity of one who is independent and proud or of someone, who is subjected and colonized. For a critical philosophy both forms are historically relative and random on the way to the global cosmopolitan state as it is defined by Kant in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.

329 Of course, there is a question Kantian aesthetician must answer: what is uniquely Taiwanese in Taiwan local color and how to verbalize this uniqueness in terms of critical philosophy. However, this is too big a task to accomplish here consider the position of a prolegomenon local color occupies in the transition to the aesthetics of the sublime. I hope to return to this question later. It is enough to present it as a beauty for the transition to the aesthetics of the sublime.

wound-like trypophobic holes. Reason come in dialectical relations with nature on that soil, and Li painted the circular logic of it by repeating the rhythms of the tilled soil.

This mass of dirt and vegetation looks like meat from Francis Bacon's painting, but unlike the art by Bacon, it justifies not to the trauma and experience of flesh, but to the ability to overcome the trauma of hard work through reason. In other word, The village has a special relation with locality, but its intrinsic character is not exclusive. One can imagine himself living in that village, or imagine himself communicating with a local person.

Adherent beauty in local-color Free beauty in local-color

Identity Reason

The observer of The Village can freely move from the position of identity to a position of rational agent evaluating the conditions of other such agent.³³⁰ The former harmonizes the viewer with his surroundings. The position of identity can harmonise with a neighbor distant or close, if it is an alien identity or with the agent himself if it is the identity of the viewer. The latter is a kind of 'extracorporeal experience': the viewer is not a representative of his culture or civilization in this experience, he is in between.

Just like the mix of intellectualized and pure aesthetic judgements in the normal idea (5:

232) (as it is the case with local color in general) both principles are applicable. It can be a pleasure of the identity building or an intellectual pleasure (intellectuelle Lust) of the reflection on the human condition.

The Kantian characterization of Taiwanese local color (what is called the idea (die Idee) in critical terminology) is not in a single artwork but in the ways open for Taiwanese local color. Taiwan can be a tropical China, or a tropical Japan or even a high

330 As it was said above, these two elements are in a free play relationship, so that they strengthen each other. Identity can be cured from different anxieties, reason can be enhanced through a bigger variety. It is a kind of free play in the beautiful. However, not any concept can be used, but any concept related to the locale represented.

tech Austronesian domain. Since the Chinese line is still the strongest one in Taiwan,³³¹ it can be taken as a cornerstone. In this sense the idea of Taiwanese local color is in the meeting of Chinese rationality with Austronesian and Japanese rationalities. From the viewpoint of the geographic determinism, it is also the experience of Chinese rationality existing in the condition of the tropical island. The implicitness of Chinese civilization, discussed by François Jullien, is crucified on the cultural crossroad of Taiwan. This collision can stand behind tragic episodes of Taiwanese history.

The implicitness presupposes isolation, which was the factor in Chinese history, but not in the history of Taiwan. Taiwanese history has started with the discovery of Taiwan, with a disclosure rather than with evasion, the main feature of the implicitness.

Another point is what can be called a continental mentality, which is the feature of China and thus Taiwan gives an island experience to the most continental of civilizations.

These fundamental cultural process affects everyone in the island, and the artists cannot be the exception. It can be seen in the early paintings by Li Mei-shu, or in the local color of Taiwanese art, in the pushcars,³³² or in the deeply tanned faces on the paintings by Chen Cheng-po. The Chorus ( 合 唱 , 1943), a highly controversial painting by Li Shi-qiao ( 李 石 樵 ) shows children singing while reading the lyrics from a piece of paper.

One of the children is wearing military-like green clothes and another is wearing a cap, which reminds the military cap from the WWII Japanese soldier's uniform. This painting is criticized for the conformity with colonial authorities and the support of Japanese militarism at the high point of World War II. It expresses the readiness to serve the empire on the battleground, and willingness of Taiwanese children to grow up and replace their fathers on the fields of Japanese conquest. But behind all this terrible

331 After all, Mandarin is an official language of Taiwan, Japanese or Austronesian languages fall far behind Mandarin and its local topolects, Taiyu and Hakka.

332 Push car (台車) is a unique feature of Taiwan early industrial period, a wagonette moved by human physical force, a kind of 'railroad rickshaw'.

elements, The Chorus also shows the dialogue of cultures. Historically, such dialogues are often accompanied with violence and oppression.

3 The working model: The sublime aesthetics in the Taiwanese Avant-garde art

The structure of this chapter comes from a double transition. The first transition is from beauty to the aesthetics of the sublime in European Avant-garde art. European artists and critics used to judge art from the viewpoint of beauty, but during the early years of the 20^th century more and more elements of the sublime came in. The second transition was in Taiwan, where artists of the 60s adopted more and more of the experience of Avant-garde. The comparison of the two has temporal, geo-cultural and 'transcendental' aspects. The temporal aspect comes from art history alone. The geo-cultural aspect comes not only from art history, but also from sinology and Avant-garde studies. The 'transcendental' aspect comes from the shift in focus from beauty to the sublime. It is concerned with the empirical applications of transcendental faculties, hence the 'transcendental' aspect.

The main problem comes from a conflict between the first and the third aspects.

Thus, if we take the Avant-garde period chronologically, the last realist painting by Repin is made after impressionism, after Picasso's Cubism and even after the apex point of full abstraction in Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich. But from the viewpoint of the transition, Repin's realism belongs to the beautiful and thus is replaced first with Picasso and later with abstract art. The criterion of judgment has changed. Shchukin's 'if painting shocks you - buy it' makes Repin obsolete in the 20s, and even more so at the time of his last artworks.

Avant-garde art in general shows a similar logic of succession and chronological coexistence, with surrealism and minimalist abstract art. Surrealism is still alive while Suprematist-like minimalist abstract art is much less popular and successful. The case of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc being removed from the Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan is a

good example.³³³

In the shocking strategy of Avant-garde art there are two main periods: the period of exterior shock and the period of interior shock. In the period of an exterior shock artists tried to shock the viewer by using material which the viewer was supposed to see as inappropriate (zweckwidrig). It was a time when artists were brave enough to use something 'vulgar' or something 'exotic'. It was also a time when they applied 'primitive art' and 'folk culture'. It is exterior only in comparison to the next phase, otherwise, it has a strong connection with a set of ethico-aesthetic problems, in particular with that of a search for the unspoiled world of 'primitive art' (it is a case with Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)) or Goncharova's wholeness of the 'folk culture'. Both options fall under the rich category of Kantian simplicity,³³⁴ ''the style of nature in the sublime'' (5: 275). However, despite having a deep inner content, these strategies are still focused on an exterior relation: something from the outside is brought to the gallery or to the museum. Artists at that stage turn into explorers. Hence 'an external period'.

The shift from the exterior to the interior in Avant-garde art was because of two main reasons. Partly it happened because of the drive of the art market: to shock more an artist needed to go further and further. Gauguin seems to exhaust this strategy understood geo-culturally by reaching the Austronesian world. On the other hand, there was a drive from inner reasons, from the logic of the aesthetic of the sublime: Avant-garde artists tried to internalize their search. Geography was replaced with psychology. The interest in 'primitive art' ignited interest in early forms of religion, like that of shamanism. Freud's psychology gave an alternative path, theosophy and a fashion for all things occult or mystical provided the third option. The Freudian line played a peripheral role here. Of course, some Avant-gardists used Freud, but usually Freudism was mixed with mysticism. Even Breton, a leader of Surrealism with medical background, who was

333 Miwon Kwon (2002), One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, London and Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 57. In the thesis the case of Serra's Tilted Arc is discussed in more detail in 4.2.

334 Discussed in detail in 3.2.

accused of replacing art with psychology, not only used psychoanalysis, but also Medieval mysticism and alchemy.

The shift from the exterior to the interior periods is best understood as an invention of a new type of Avant-garde artist. She is no longer just a creator of aesthetic objects.

Now she uses her art to open a new world to explore, a world which at first can be interpreted as a mystical realm of cosmic rays, as theosophy teaches (it is particularly the case of Mondrian, many other artists create artworks which reminds abstractions because of the interest in mandalas theosophy popularizes). The figure of a shaman, an ethnic specialist in music, dance, painting and communication with the spirits, receives a special attention in international art of the 20s.

The 'interiorisation' of Avant-garde art raises particular problems to a Kantian approach. The artwork which was meant to be a fetish, as it was the case with Picasso,

The 'interiorisation' of Avant-garde art raises particular problems to a Kantian approach. The artwork which was meant to be a fetish, as it was the case with Picasso,

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