Photography Cinema

Liang Ting Yu: Firearms, Skulls & Bones

Image Maker

Liang Ting Yu

LIANG Ting Yu received his Master’s Degree in Trans-disciplinary Arts from Taipei National University of Arts. Liang’s practice focuses on integrating regional investigations and studies with project-based art actions and mixed media art. He examines issues related to historical archives and ethnic relations, and has recently expanded into exploring archives, local myths and legends. Liang works with language, still and moving imagery, and local ghost stories, to create art that looks into relationships between ghosts and topography.

Place of Origin

Taiwan

Year

2021

Duration

12’50”

Language

In Japanese with Chinese and English subtitles

Overview

The video work Firearms, Skulls, and Bones reexamines colonial images in an attempt to break free from the visual language and textual descriptions of the colonisers and return to a more life-centered and affective reading approach. The project departs from the deplorable act of Japanese anthropologists Mori Ushinosuke and Torii Ryūzō, who stole bones from Taiwan’s indigenous tribes in the 1900s. It connects their bone-collecting fetish and their barbarisation of indigenous headhunting practices through image manipulation, using close-ups of indigenous skulls obtained by Japanese troops in their mountain warfare against the tribes during the colonial period (1895–1945). Looking into the process of obtaining, transporting, measuring, archiving and specimenising skulls and bones, which served as a ‘production line’ for Japanese research into Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, the project rethinks the connections between militaristic governance and the production of anthropological knowledge.

*This work is classified as not suitable for young persons and children.

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