Chieh-Hsiang Wu
The commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Formosa Incident was held in the Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, an institution remodeled from the Jing-Mei Detention Center. The Formosa Incident happened in December 1979, when editors, among other staff, of the Formosa Magazine, a banned journal, which nevertheless printed and circulated four issues, were arrested from their gathering for the International Human Right Day. The 61 defendants were tried in courts-martial and put in prison (PTS News Network 2010). In the park, a public art installation by Yu Wen-Fu was vandalized by human right activist Chen Chia-Chun, who asserted that the installation was honoring the White Terror perpetrator Wang Hsi-Ling. Yu’s installation was a meadow of white grass with several doves perching over it. This meadow surrounded the housing unit of Wang where he has living under house arrest. But Wang was not a victim like the others incarcerated in this former detention center; he has a high-ranking officer of the secret service and was imprisoned because of a scandalous assassination he had been involved in. The dispute over the appropriateness of such a peaceful-looking artwork drew the attention of artists as well as the public at large. A question was raised: What is the role of art in helping us to understand history?
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