Summoning Spirits in the Traumatic Space
Author: Evelyn Char
Memory forms the foundation of self-consciousness, and the memories each person possesses are private. At the same time, collective memory allows individuals to cohere into a community, thus memory also has public and political aspects. Memory is a battlefield, where empire, nation, and transnational capital often dominate the discourses and circulation of memory. What we remember and how we remember are influenced by these powers.
Some contemporary artists resist this domination by activating specific architectural spaces to summon the ghosts left behind by historical trauma, telling buried memories, thereby emphasising the plural, contradictory, and polysemic nature of memory and opening the possibility of rewriting memory.
1. Monuments and National Memory
In the high-ceilinged hall, there is a changing of the guard ceremony performed every hour in front of the large, seated statue of Sun Yat-sen. Under the watchful eyes of the founding father’s ghost, the maneuvers and drills of the ceremonial guards repeatedly enact the mythology of state military might, and the grand National Dr Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is undoubtedly the most fitting venue. Externally, with its red walls, yellow roofs, and flying eaves soaring skyward at each of the four corners, it evokes the glorious imperial era of China everywhere you look. In this enormous edifice built with lavish public funds, a dual and contradictory summoning of spirits takes place: it invokes the modern national hero and emphasises that the Kuomintang (KMT) is the successor of the anti-feudal revolutionary forces, while at the same time summoning the aesthetics of Qing dynasty imperial architecture through imitation, thereby highlighting that Taiwan is the inheritor of orthodox Chinese culture.
Architect Yang Cho-cheng’s firm Dahlee left behind photographs of the preliminary architectural model for the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, which show that the initial design was completely different from the final product: architect Wang Dahong’s design responded to the demands of the architectural committee by integrating Chinese and Western elements. From the model and section drawings, we can see that the eaves did not adopt the traditional Chinese flying eaves, and the roof shape was like a wushamao hat, incorporating references to Chinese classical architectural tradition while the sleek curved shapes also contained the structural features of modernist architecture. After seeing the model, Chiang Kai-shek thought it was too Westernised and demanded more Chinese elements to be incorporated, whereas Wang considered the architecture of the Qing dynasty to symbolise the decadence and corruption of imperial rule and was against imitating it. After several years of back-and-forth, the final plan took shape: the roof shape approximated the traditional hip-and-gable style, while also forcefully flipping up the eaves at the main entrance. It turned out to be rather far from the original concept. Wang’s reluctant artistic compromise bore witness to the defeat of modernism in Cold War era Taiwan—at that time, the nation needed memorial monuments with conjuring power, not future-oriented, innovative modern architecture.
Memorials are the material and spatial embodiment of official memory. State power decides who and what is memorialised, then permanent stones or buildings are constructed to consolidate an authoritative version of memory and to build community through this. In contemporary art there have been many anti-memorial attempts that question grand historical narratives, for example: artists who used ephemeral materials to build temporary structures, or constructed ‘memorials’ that are inverted and buried underground, pointing to wounded histories, nameless sacrifices, and the politics of memory.
2. State Violence and Ghostly Spaces
Chen Chieh-jen’s video work Military Court and Prison (2007–2008) presents the underside of official memory through a temporary spatial structure. Filmed in 35mm, the military court and prison the work refers to is a space that will soon be rebuilt as a human rights memorial; the artist summons nameless political prisoners and, through their eyes, stares at this netherworld caught between past, present, and future. At the start of the video, the constructed ‘military court’ opens up under the slowly panning camera, as if the ghosts of political prisoners are trapped in the spatio-temporal configuration on the eve of martial law’s abolition, wandering and pacing in circles inside, at times gazing at or touching objects like sentencing documents, newspapers, and blood-stained prisoner uniforms. The slow moving camera and close-up slow motion all emphasise the stagnant time inhabited by the lingering ghosts.
In the mainstream discourse, the transformation of the military court from the White Terror era into a human rights memorial is a spatial symbol of the nation’s progress. However, Chen’s summoning is not just to memorialise the White Terror and dress the wounds of the national subject, but more so to use the ghosts who cannot leave the military court to question this progressive narrative, metaphorising that the exclusionary system of the state did not actually end with the lifting of martial law in 1987. He invited homeless people, unemployed workers, and foreign labourers to participate in the performance. In a later part of the video, these nameless figures attempt to push a massive structure with their bare bodies, silently questioning: for the superfluous lives today, has martial law really ended? The video ends with a close-up of a broken clock, time still frozen at five minutes before the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Chen’s ‘military court"’space functions as a symbol of the perpetuation of the martial law order, while the memories of political prisoners also resonate with the lived experience of contemporary superfluous lives.
3. Ruins and Transnational Trauma
Hsu Chia-Wei’s work Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau (2015) similarly deals with wounds extending from the Cold War period to the present. He travelled far to the Thai-Burmese border and, together with the diasporic nationalists stuck in the interstices of a nation, excavated a forgotten transnational wound. These veterans were originally KMT troops who retreated from Yunnan to the Thai-Burmese border and were abandoned by the KMT regime when they relocated to Taiwan, leaving them without a sovereign state that recognises their existence. They could only flee into the mountains and forests, becoming living ghosts, clinging to survival in the liminal space between nations. During the Cold War, the United States set up an intelligence bureau in their village settlement, and these orphaned troops naturally became intelligence mercenaries, continuing to fight communists in exchange for a space of survival.
The video revolves around the monkey deity Hanuman in a puppet play. This is accompanied by the surreal oral recollections of an old veteran, who describes how the troops fled in disarray through the tropical jungles, narrowly surviving with Hanuman’s help. As the narrative progresses, the camera slowly zooms out from a close-up of Hanuman, and we realise the puppet show is being performed at the ruins of the old intelligence station; zooming out further, we see that both the performers and audience are former intelligence soldiers and Thai troops. Although the work is titled Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau, these ruins no longer exist, only traces of the foundation remain. Unlike Chen’s choice to rebuild a contemporary military court, Hsu transforms the blank space into a puppet show stage, and through this segment of the performance, summons the veterans’ traumatic memories of drifting between battlefields and nations.
Both the Hanuman myths and the Thai-inspired performance genre are prevalent visual cultures in Southeast Asian countries; their performance by these formerly China-born KMT troops highlights the awkward and ambiguous nature of their identity and belonging. Moreover, in the Hindu epic Ramayana, Hanuman assists the prince Rama in defeating his enemy and returning to rule his kingdom of Ayodhya; this corresponds to the fate of these veterans who died in exile. Although the Hanuman play seems like a ritual to invoke divine blessings, it is ultimately a futile act.
4. Transnational Capital and Disappeared Spaces
Sopheap Pich takes a very different approach, but his work also refers to disappeared architectural spaces and transnational traumas. Using his signature materials such as bamboo strips, rattan, and metal rods, the individual components in Compound (2011) resemble fishing traps, baskets, and other peasant artefacts. Pich was born in rural Cambodia, fled during the Khmer Rouge genocide, and returned to Cambodia two decades later, where he began using local materials in his work, with the shapes and materials evoking sensory memories of home as well as the trauma of diasporic dislocation.
These works, however, do not purely appeal to nostalgic childhood memories. In Compound, the bamboo needs to be held together with metal rods, but these metals are actually recycled from bomb shells left over from the Vietnam War, inherently containing the remnants of violence, reminding us of the souls sacrificed for national conflicts under the Cold War. Just as Chen does not view the White Terror in the past perfect tense, the transnational violence Compound criticises also implicates the present. In recent years, Phnom Penh has been rapidly redeveloped due to incoming transnational capital, and it happened that one day the artist suddenly received an eviction order for his studio by Boeung Kak Lake —a shared habitat for people, animals, and nature that was wiped out by ‘development’, shattering the community. During this period of eviction, over the course of eight months, Pich strung together components resembling high-rises or missiles, completing a total of 83 pieces that can be assembled into different configurations of Compound. Under the tide of globalisation, imperialism returns in disguise through capital. Bombs are dissolved, recycled, and reconfigured into construction materials, while bulldozers mask the violence with the sugarcoating of economic development, crushing local communities in their paths. Compound symbolises the violence contained within these brand new, progressive architectural spaces, and through its materials, connects the sacrificed of past and present.
Conclusion
These works demonstrate that the authority to construct, preserve, or erase spaces—and the power to determine which memories persist and circulate within them—lies primarily with the state and transnational capital. In The Return of Ghosts, Chen Chieh-jen asserts that ‘various “old demons”—imperialism, militarism, and nationalism—have all donned new masks to continue their performance.’ Under this premise, contemporary Asian societies should harness the act of summoning as a practical strategy of resistance today. The significance of ghost manifestation lies in exposing the nexus between past trauma and present violence; ghosts appear to trouble the ruins of the present—all for the sake of a justice yet to come.