Taiwanese Cineplasticity: Six Cross-Disciplinary Moving-Image Arts in Search of Cinema

This book focuses on postwar Taiwanese cross-disciplinary moving-image arts, examining works that traverse cinema and the visual arts yet remain difficult to be situated within mainstream film studies or art-historical frameworks. These image practices stand at the intersection of debates between modernism and local realism, media transformations before and after Taiwan’s martial-law era, and the dual turn in contemporary art. Spanning documentary film, video art, and experimental cinema, they reconfigure alternative cinematic forms; while also circulating across television, cinemas, art museums, and outdoor spaces, revealing both poetic transformation and political potential, thus creating an intermediary state of image practice.

To address these complexities, the concept of cineplasticity is proposed, highlighting the malleability, variability, and conceptual potential of the moving image: even pieces hidden outside dominant historical narratives emerge, manifesting audiovisual compositional force and generating overlapping dynamics.

Organized into three parts and six chapters, the study employs a dual lens of historiography and cineplasticity to analyze the works of seven artists since the 1970s, including Chang Chao-Tang’s and Chen Chieh-Jen’s creations situated between reality and fiction; Kao Chung-Li’s, Yuan Goang-Ming’s, and Wang Jun-Jieh’s technical and rhetorical innovations; and Su Hui-yu’s, Chen Chieh-Jen’s, and Kao Jun Honn’s explorations of exhibition spaces and audience mapping. Through these analyses, it constructs a new historical, aesthetic, and theoretical paradigm for Taiwanese cross-disciplinary moving-image arts.