Between Imperial gaze and the Continental gaze: An Artistic Research Project on Hainan Island

As the second largest island in the Greater China region next to Taiwan, the image of Hainan Island oscillates between that of a borderland with exotic charms and a frontier with socio-economic developmental potentials. Covering both visual and textual representations of Hainan from the late nineteenth century to the Japanese colonial period, I examine literary representations found in travelogues and anthropological documentations, produced by various host of agents: Han Chinese from the Mainland, Western missionaries and explorers, Japanese and Li-ethnicity elite between 1883 and 1939. Through examining these texts, I aim to contour Hainan’s islandness that may place the history of island, hitherto marginalized, in its proper place, which sheds light on how we reconsider Hainan not as a tabula rasa in both imperial and national gaze from the above.
Based on this research, I will create a video art project that remaps Hainan’s subordinate position vis-à-vis the mainland and its own mainland-ness, as it were, in relation to the surrounding archipelagos, overseas Chinese communities and even other islands around the world as a community. The art project takes the form of a semi-fictional, semi-documentary narrative in which Hainan’s history and present are interwoven into a renewed perspective to the island’s identity and reality. I explore the possibility of organizing the screening of the artwork in local Hainan communities, especially in those areas that were mentioned in the texts and photographs to make connections between historical images and texts with today's people on Hainan.
The project offers alternative ways to reconsider ways of looking at Hainan and other islands in China and their relations with history-writing, art, tourism, environment, visual representation, planning, etc. I question and challenge the long-standing conceptual and historiographic binaries of center-periphery, mainland-island, boundary-territory, and land-ocean in the paradigmatic conventions in the study of modern China.