War and Art: Chen Ching-Yao Solo Exhibition
開戰84年 陳擎耀個展：戰爭與美術

The exhibition establishes a connection between Taiwanese artist Chen Ching-Yao’s paintings and Japanese culture. His new works draw on Japanese “war paintings” from the Second World War and the contemporaneous Taiwanese genre known as “current-affairs paintings.” These works enter into dialogue with selections from the collection of the Tagawa Museum of Art, including wartime albums of war paintings, special supplements from Shōnen Club magazine, a small number of tank and soldier models, and educational materials.

Together, the artworks and archival objects create a shared framework for examining several interrelated themes: the relationship between contemporary art and museum collections; the contrasting wartime experiences and imaginations of “boys” from different generations; and the ways in which illustrations in Japanese boys’ magazines contributed to the visual culture that later shaped anime, comics, and games.
A central concern of the exhibition is how to maintain a balance between its thematic framework and the historical objects on display. As the exhibition remains, fundamentally, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, my curatorial focus is on identifying meaningful connections between the collection and the artist’s practice, while ensuring that the exhibition retains the character of a contemporary art exhibition rather than becoming primarily a display of historical artifacts.

Now aged fifty, Chen Ching-Yao has been deeply influenced by Japanese visual and popular culture, including manga, tokusatsu productions, cinema, models, and girl groups. These influences are evident in both his artistic practice and his personal collections.

In this exhibition, I juxtapose artifacts from the 1930s with artworks created in the 2020s. For example, the Shōnen Club paper-model supplement Battleship Mikasa is displayed alongside Chen’s image of young women defending the maritime frontier. Original albums of Japanese “war paintings” are similarly paired with Chen’s reinterpretations of battlefield scenes populated by girls in uniform. Through these juxtapositions, the exhibition highlights both the differences and the continuities between the visual cultures of two generations.

Shōnen Club was a magazine for young readers, but it also formed part of the wartime propaganda apparatus. Its images presented war on a grand and spectacular scale. They depicted an imagined war rather than the reality of warfare. Nevertheless, their exaggerated, densely composed, and emotionally charged style later became an important visual source for war manga and related forms of film and television.

Interestingly, the tanks that frequently appear in Chen’s paintings were inspired by the fictional tanks featured in the anime series Girls und Panzer. Based on historical German tanks and rendered with remarkable detail, the models belong to Chen’s private collection. In the exhibition, they are displayed alongside a wooden tank model dating from 1938. This juxtaposition creates a dialogue between attitudes toward war across different generations, separated by more than eighty years. It also reveals how a contemporary artist who has never directly experienced war has learned particular ways of depicting its appearance and atmosphere through animation and popular culture.

The exhibition was also developed in collaboration with historical consultant Chen Fei-Hao. Together, we identified documents and paintings in the collection of the Tagawa Museum of Art relating to Taiwan and Japan’s other former colonies. A section devoted to Taiwan was created within the exhibition, examining representations of Taiwan in wartime painting albums and presenting works produced by Taiwanese artists under the political conditions of the same period, such as Jiang Wen-Ye’s Song of the Three Human Bomb Heroes. This section emphasizes Taiwan’s complex role during the Second World War while establishing a further point of comparison with Chen Ching-Yao, the contemporary Taiwanese artist at the centre of the exhibition.