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After years of development, Women's visual arts have increased in aspects of its genre or quantity. Women's spirituality related creative works have also provided audiences with more varieties of thinking and dialogic modes. Especially, since 1990s, major joint art exhibitions in Taiwan have pioneered and expanded the exploration, the content of Women's visual arts and their aestheticism. An observation on the exhibitions in three major official museums in Taiwan (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum) reveals the fact that the attempts and efforts of Women's visual arts to expand new models and formats have formed important directions, and have thus constructed an indispensable part of art development in Taiwan. Facing the rapid changes and developments of art scenes in the 21st century, how do Taiwanese Women artists confront the world trend and their situation in life while proposing their own point of view through the artworks? The present paper attempts to sort out the characteristics of Taiwanese Women's visual arts from the angle of Women spirituality. Through a replenishing point of view, the multiplicity to the Women's Arts should be revealed. Through the re-exploration of different Women's arts orient and occident, and reconsider the oppressions and persecutions of female body and mind enforced by the structure of traditional paternal monotheism and industrial science, this paper will provide a spiritual enlightenment to Taiwanese Women's spirituality & eco-political arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the 1945 regime change in Taiwan, the status of Tōyōga/Eastern Painting plunged from being the "darling" of official exhibitions to "public enemy". At an art forum in 1951, the artists who migrated from mainland China launched the first attack. They lashed out against Tōyōga, ridiculing it with a common Chinese saying, "worshipping another family's ancestors as one's own". At the "Art Movement Symposium" in 1954, it was adamantly asserted that "Guohua produced in Taiwan is an extension of the motherland" and that "paintings by Han Chinese in Taiwan constituted Guohua". The majority of the participants at the symposium were Taiwanese artists who established themselves during the Japanese colonial era. The two art conferences appear to be unrelated, but in fact both were responses to regime change and attempts at imagining cultural identification. The theme of cultural belonging in art was brought into play dramatically on the stage of Taiwanese society during the early post-war period. It was generally known as the "controversy of orthodox Guohua". A macro-analysis of cultural politics determines the inter-relationships between politics, culture and institutions in the cultural policies devised by the Nationalist Party during the early post-war period. However, this analysis on the macro level may not be adequate for an exhaustive study on how the subject can engage in cultural action under the aforesaid system. This paper provides a micro-analysis of cultural politics. It argues that the subject's cultural competence is a reflection of how cultural policies have been translated and put into practice, as well as how culture has been manifested concretely and effectively. Through an analysis on the micro level, this paper examines the issues pertaining to cultural naming and the imagination of cultural identity under the rubric of the "controversy orthodox Guohua". The critical approach of this paper is in accord with Eric Hobsbawm's concept of "the invention of tradition," as both are concerned with how the subject and the community negotiate through and respond to new political and cultural circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of painting in Taiwan in the early twentieth century was first inspired by Japanese art teachers. The new idea of "realistic painting" introduced at the time allowed the discovery of "local colors." However, the Taiwanese painters who employed the artistic ideal of "painting one's intent" were able to escape the limitation imposed by the concept of "local colors." How did the painters explore the artistic styles offered by the new global contexts through the colonization of Japan is an important issue that requires in-depth investigation. This issue is further complicated by painters who were not only influenced by the Japanese arts but also the traditional Chinese arts, as some of the Taiwanese painters moved to China after their training in Japan in order to search for a new style that conflates the Eastern and the Western arts. Taking several painters, Liu Jintang, Chen Chengpo, and Guo Bochuan as examples, this paper explores issues of identity, cultural impacts, and stylistic developments of the arts in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]