Hide & Seek Audiovisual Art was founded in 2017 by a group of cultural practitioners from diverse fields including contemporary art, museum studies, history, literature, sociology, law, film, and visual design. We are committed to civic engagement across a range of social issues, with a focus on promoting public education and cultural participation. We collaborate with art and history museums, libraries, schools, and local communities to develop and implement educational programmes, design teaching materials, and create learning tools. We also actively seek resources to build and sustain non-profit cultural and educational initiatives that invite people of different ages and backgrounds to engage with public issues and share knowledge.

The Cheering Song of 1943 traces parallel realities of Tirailleurs that can be found in the context of the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in which Indigenous Taiwanese people volunteered to fight for Imperial Japan in the Second World War. This project anchors itself at the intersection of three historical fields: colonialism, war, and sports. It aims to explore how state power continuously and systematically eliminates and exploits individual agency, using ‘names’ as a symbol of coerced identity. We focus on the life trajectory of Suniuo/Suriyon, an Amis[1] man, as a case study of how state power dominates and shapes individual identity through three name changes.

During the Japanese colonization, Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples were marginalized and oppressed. Embroiled in Japan’s colonial project of modernization and militarization, the native Taiwanese served in the famous Noko High School Baseball Team (能高棒球隊), and later the Takasago Volunteer Army (高砂義勇軍), fighting for Japan during the Second World War on South East Asian battlefields. Glory on the baseball field and the bloodshed on the battlefield together constructed their contradictory fate of the ‘conscripted bodies'[2] under colonial rule.

Suniuo, a young Amis man whose name in his tribe means ‘brave’, was once the best catcher for the Taitung Prefecture Baseball Team. However, he was forced to change his name to ‘Nakamura Teruo’ (中村輝夫) under the Japanization policy and was drafted to fight in Indonesia in 1943. After the war, he disappeared for over thirty years in the Indonesian jungle before being confirmed alive, facing political controversy upon his return to a post-war Taiwan known as the Republic of China. Ultimately, the Kuomintang government ‘restored’ his Chinese name to Li Guanghui (李光輝): Li is the most common Chinese surname while Guanghui symbolizes the brilliance of the new government, thereby integrating him into the Han Chinese system. During the Kuomintang nationalist government era, policies promoted in the name of ‘modernization’ continued to encroach on ethnic space. Politically charged Chinese characters such as 忠孝 (‘loyalty and filial piety’) and 復興 (‘restoration’) replaced tribal names, becoming the ‘passport’ for Indigenous people to navigate mainstream Han-centric society.

Even today, Indigenous athletes, while representing Taiwan with outstanding performances on the international sports stage, are still referred to and remembered by their Chinese names; the public often only realizing their ethnic identity after their success. The erasure and slow recognition of Indigenous Taiwanese tribal names is still a structural problem that remains largely unresolved. By retelling Suniuo’s life history of being repeatedly renamed by different regimes, this project aspires to guide and assist the public to rethink the political motives behind names and identity, as well as the meaning embedded in the action of restoration.

Based on the understanding that education is essentially an extension of state power, we choose the learning kit as our intervention method. Challenging this form of state power, this learning kit aims to fill information gaps, reject one-way knowledge transmission, give the power of interpretation back to the observers, and invite participants to establish their own ‘method of understanding’. The objects within the kit are transformed into ‘fragments of clues’, emphasizing their tangible, highly perceptible, and adaptable qualities.

The learning kit includes one instructor’s box and three to four operation boxes. The instructor’s box contains teaching materials and background information, while the participants' boxes hold core objects created based on Suniuo’s life trajectory. The programme is divided into two phases: In the first phase, participants need to arrange objects according to three different names, deduce the reasons for the changes in the identities of the object holders, and discuss the core question: ‘Why are there three names for one individual?’ In the second phase, after being informed of the historical materials in the teaching-aid box, participants would imagine a baseball game that Suniuo missed due to conscription in 1943. They are invited to create a cheering song[3] to support Suniuo in the fictional 1943 game. Participants will select a melody from a given task package, write the lyrics, and finally seal their recording files in the box.

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[1] The Amis are an Indigenous Austronesian ethnic group native to Taiwan, and one of the sixteen officially recognized Taiwanese Indigenous peoples.

[2] Although known as a volunteer troop, the Takasago soldiers were enlisted due to a variety of reasons, including military mobilization and financial and political coercion. Towards the end of the war, many of them were conscripted to support the front line in distress.

[3] Creating cheering songs for individual baseball players is a popular contemporary phenomenon in Asia, such as in Japan's and Taiwan’s baseball games.