Marginal Discourse and Pacific Rim Women's Arts 1

A transnational perspective highlights the permeability of national borders and traces themes that transcend the boundaries that delineate nations or states. A “minor” transnational perspective not only locates these themes in metropolitan spaces occupied by minorities but also insists on how these themes in places peripheral to the focus of traditional Western academic discourse, such as Taiwan, can suggest networks of cultures that do not always need to be mediated by, or disseminated through, metropolitan centers (Lionnet 1994, 1995). ⁴ In a similar spirit, this review essay will focus on the visual artworks of Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese women artists in their (dis)engagement with metropolitan feminist art, examining in some detail an exhibit called Lord of the Rim: In Herself/For Herself, held December 1997–January 1998 in Hsin Chuang, a small textile city at the border of the Taipei Rim in northern Taiwan. ⁵ Hsin Chuang, the site of this exhibit, an industrialized city once filled with female workers from all over the island, was devoted to the so-called modernization of Taiwan; accordingly, the exhibit’s goals include recording the memories, the oral histories, and the development of third-world countries more generally. Gender, identity, and the representation of marginal subjects are its driving organizational principles.