“Nature and Gender: Women Artists Depicting Plants in Colonial Taiwan”

Chinghsin Wu (Associate Teaching Professor, Rutgers University) - “Nature and Gender: Women Artists Depicting Plants in Colonial Taiwan”

Ruling Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, the Japanese colonial government mobilized painters to depict the landscapes of Taiwan as symbols of the expanse and extent of the Japanese Empire. While seeking out new subject matters, these artists, on the one hand, explored the native plants and living creatures endemic to Taiwan; on the other hand, the "nature" that they depicted paralleled and imbricated the modern, scientifically cultivated land and cityscapes that the Japanese colonial government sought to construct on the island.

This paper focuses on plant paintings by one of the most significant Japanese-style artists in Taiwan during this period, Gōhara Kotō, as well as works by his Taiwanese students at the Third Girls' High School in 1920s and 1930s Taiwan. Beginning from the late 1920s, Kotō and other artists successfully promoted a government-sponsored fine arts exhibition that eventually stimulated themselves and local painters, including many of his female students, to explore the local scenery of Taiwan, especially its plant life.

While Kotō explored a wide variety of landscapes in Taiwan, including mountains, seashores, and forests many of his students from the Third Girls' High School remained focused on plant motifs. This paper first analyzes Kotō’s exploration of plants, which reflect the changing biota of Taiwan, especially newly implanted species that formed the new landscapes of the main colonial entrepôts. It will then examine the paintings produced by Kotō's female Taiwanese students, focusing on the range and sources of the plants they depicted, the societal expectations and limitations regarding their choices of how to depict nature, and how they reacted to the changing botanical environment of their home island.