ABSTRACT
Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang are recognized as the most influential among Taiwanese New Wave Cinema’s directors. One of the major concerns of these auteur directors has been to reevaluate notions of Taiwanese identity beyond colonial narratives. Images of Japan (places, persons, things) and travels to Japan by Taiwanese characters are recurring topics in many movies of both directors, e.g. in A City of Sadness, Millennium Mambo, Café Lumiere or A One and a Two. I argue that both directors are constructing exotic images of Japan, which in terms of postcolonial theory and its reading of the figure of exoticism is problematic. The assumption of ongoing, neo-imperialist hegemonies within postcolonial theory suggests that it should be the former colonizer who establishes and implements exotic images of the formerly colonized, but not vice versa. The chapter explores three approaches to navigate this gap: (i) a culture-specific approach based on the particular postcolonial relation between Taiwan and Japan; (ii) a rereading of exoticism by strengthening aesthetic aspects and notions of the individual voyage following a French intellectual tradition; and (iii) the capability of fictionality to undermine hegemonic systems of representation, especially in the field of modernist film and literature.
