Art and Politics
It is funny to revive my medium in this way… but I just felt the impulse to write something. Brain-vomiting basically.
When Terry Guo announced Lai Pei-Hsia as his running mate, many commented that it was a solid example of life imitating art, as Lai played the character Lin Yueh-chen in the hit Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers. Lai suddenly went from playing a president in a Netflix show to being an actual vice presidential candidate. Nothing could be more dramatic than that. Not to mention her speech at the press conference, which perfectly revealed the theatrical nature of politics and political presentations.
As a theatre scholar, there is nothing more exciting than to see this. Politics is always theatrical and performative. The press conference provides a stage for politicians to perform, with the press and the people in front of the screens as their audience. And now we even have a professional actress. How amazing! (I almost wrote a paper analyzing the theatricality of Ministry of Health and Welfare’s daily press conference during the pandemic. My abstract was rejected by a conference so this paper was eventually never written.)
It is nothing new to have artists/actors-politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Donald Trump was also a variety show character. And Volodymyr Zelensky. There was an article by CNN about how Zelensky’s acting career prepared him for the “world stage.” Even Ronald Reagan was signed to Warner Bros for a while before getting into politics.
Back to the point — is it really that life imitates art, or vice versa?
I thought of Plato’s love-hate relationship with art. I don’t study philosophy, so forgive any personal (mis)interpretation of his words. For Plato, art is both a good source of entertainment and a dangerous delusion. He and his student Aristotle both drew attention to the idea of mimesis, that it is a natural human impulse to make art that imitates life. But Plato thought of life as an imitation (or pursuit) of something ideal. If life is an imitation of the ideal, and art is an imitation of life, then art is just an imitation of an imitation. Art is extremely far from the ideal. It is something deceptive. If you indulge in art too much, you will never be able to approach the ideal.
Similar concerns can also be read in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic. In the allegory, shadows are cast on the wall of a cave by moving figures representing humans and animals. There is a group of prisoners chained in the cave and their view is limited to a single direction toward a wall where the shadows emerge. As the shadows on the wall are the only things that the prisoners see, they believe that the shadows they see are the truth because they know no other reality. The appearances in front of their eyes might be mistaken for truth since our access to the ideal that stands behind the visual world is blocked by shadows. All that prisoners see are illusions.
If we think of the present, the prisoners become those who are confined to their sofa or chair, constantly facing the television or computer. The cave wall is now the screen and the shadows are the media. These present-day prisoners take the images given by the media as the way things are. In the original allegory, there was a person who found ways to leave the cave and then realized that reality was nothing like what he saw in the cave. But when the person brought his discovery back to the cave, no one believed him and no one wanted to leave. They chose illusions
Besides favoring illusions over reality, what’s more concerning is the failure to recognize the boundaries in between. That’s why Plato always said that art is powerful and, therefore dangerous.
Does Guo choose Lai for her likeability as an actress, or her ability to create illusions?
And, is Lai’s case an example of life imitating art, or art imitating life? It is just like the question of what came first, a chicken or an egg.
Or like Gertrude Stein’s a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Art is an imitation of life is an imitation of art is an imitation of life is an imitation…
Looking back at the 2018 Golden Horse Award, people said the award “turned political” after director Fu Yu won the Best Documentary for Our Youth in Taiwan and Chinese artists' subsequent boycott of the award. Did the award turn political solely because of Fu Yu’s speech? No. Art is politics. Politics is art.
In fact, Lai Pei-Hsia was nominated for the Golden Bell Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film for her performance in Wave Makers on the same day of the press conference where she confirmed her teaming up with Guo for the 2024 presidential election. The timing was definitely well thought out, and I don’t think life can be more dramatic.
Finally, tickets for The Mush Room, a production of M.O.V.E. Theatre commissioned by the Taipei Performing Arts Center that will open in November, went on sale earlier today. Just a few hours later, both M.O.V.E. Theatre and Taipei Performing Arts Center announced the cancellation (or postponement) of the show and the refund of all tickets sold, stating that the lead Lai Pei-Hsia had decided not to participate in the production for personal reasons.
A theatre production requires many people’s collective efforts and months, if not years, of planning. A theatre producer (not with M.O.V.E. or TPAC) explained how much effort and money went into the air because of this. Guo and Lai said they wanted to save Taiwan’s economy and provide a brighter future. But before that, many theatre workers lost their jobs because of them. (Not to even mention what has happened in Foxcomm in the past few decades.)
I guess this is what upsets me the most. Art is always political.
