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Abstract
In 2011, amid a string of controversies in the Taiwanese countryside surrounding industrial pollution, urban expansion, the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and the destruction of the natural and rural environments, poet and editor Hong Hong announced ‘the last pastoral poem’, suggesting that the representation of the countryside as bucolic landscape was an out-of-date and politically impotent trope. This paper argues, contrary to Hong Hong’s polemic, that depictions of pastoral utopia remain a vital and powerful alternative to the forces of urbanisation and industrialisation in Taiwan and the larger Sinophone world. The paper analyses poetry by contemporary poet Ling Yu against the background of the tradition of utopian pastoral writing represented by the book of Genesis, Virgil, Laozi, Tao Yuanming, and Gary Snyder. The paper argues for a poetics that symbolically mediates between nature and culture, and building and dwelling, by means of slow ‘cultivation’, in both the agricultural and aesthetic senses. The paper further draws on transnational Hong Kong poet Liu Wai Tong’s concept of ‘you-topia’ to suggest a means of reconciling Chinese tradition and contemporary ecocritical discourse.
Abstract
While buildings strive to reach higher and higher, cities are obsessed with a visible expression of verticality. Seediq Bale (2011) and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013) represent a new development in Taiwan’s cinematic use of landscape that challenges the dominance of urban verticalism. Seediq Bale sets up an alternative vertical dimension of mountainous areas that puts into dialogical relationship the dichotomies of civilised/barbarous, advanced/primitive, and vertical/horizontal. Audiences no longer experience space in a traditional manner, as eventually Mona Rudao’s graveyard is undiscovered/undefined. Beyond Beauty, on the other, asks viewers to ‘go higher’, encouraging a break with ordinary experience for a more spiritual quest like aerial shots. As both offer a sense of disorientation and alienation, what does the spatial metaphor address to aesthetics, ecocriticism, politics of identity, and sovereignty in geography? What are the implications as cinematic landscapes extend into a real-life environment that is ready to be consumed?