Taiwan’s mandatory military service is explored in BODO through interactive technologies that dramatise a hypermacho culture underlined by the threat of violence
A choose-your-own-adventure game with a macabre twist, Ting-Tong Chang’s immersive installation presents viewers with a journey to be undertaken by a nameless young man about to start his military service on a remote island. Travelling under a series of spotlights, audience members are guided by a narrator who introduces the island and its many strange happenings. On the first night of conscription, the protagonist dreams of being fellated by the eponymous BODO, a dead conscript’s spirit, and viewers are asked either to acknowledge this ghost or ignore it – thus beginning a branching story that could end in any number of ways: from dying a lonely death in a sea cave to being a queer fugitive on the island with a fellow conscript. The most ambitious work yet in Chang’s oeuvre, which blends site-specific installations with interactive technologies to create theatrical experiences, BODO (2023) expands the artist’s satirical explorations of contemporary Taiwanese sociopolitics into more violent and disturbing extremes.
Investigating the political aetiology of violence in post-martial law era Taiwan, BODO’s stories include graphic descriptions of hazing rituals and erotic fantasies conjured by young men in captivity. The story’s premise is loosely inspired by the work’s namesake – a hallucinatory 1993 film about Taiwanese militarism by independent-film pioneer Huang Ming-Chuan – and Chang’s own memories of conscription. (‘Bodo’, which means ‘treasure island’ in the widely spoken Taiwanese Minnan dialect, is a common moniker for Taiwan.) Narrated in a detached voiceover, the dark contents of BODO tap into the subterranean impulses – masculinity, sexuality, domination – that underlie the island’s mandatory military service policy, which is itself commonly framed as a coming-of-age ritual that turns boys into real men.
BODO suggests that this ritual is problematic and traumatic, and yet honest to the nature of these volatile young men’s desires within a military culture that amplifies their amorphous, inarticulable frustrations with a society that appears to have left them behind. The Chinese Nationalist government, which retreated to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist Party took over the mainland, introduced compulsory military service in 1949, for the most part to deter invasion from the People’s Republic of China – a looming expectation of violence that haunts Taiwan to this day. BODO presents the ways in which this perpetually postponed conflict and consequent sense of precarity can give rise to a particularly toxic brand of masculinity that normalises savagery against the weak as a coping mechanism for living with the threat of crushing, humiliating military defeat. In this hypermacho world of promised but not immediately actualised subjugation, power is the only thing that matters.
Littering the exhibition space are clifflike set pieces that evoke the craggy inhospitality of the volcanic isle where the story takes place. Coarse and jagged, these surfaces bring to mind both the barren geopolitical landscape contemporary Taiwan navigates in its struggle for self-determination and the fracturing effects of martial rule, with its arid, durable sterility that grates and erodes all efforts to surmount it. The set design is also bleakly appropriate for a work whose finales all lead to the same closing passage, which suggests that the world might be a place where ‘violence is for violence’s sake’.
BODO at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 11 March – 4 June
