Fading Photographs, Living Memories: Transnational Diasporas, Religious Community, and Visual–Material Culture in Cold War Taiwan

The founding of the PRC in 1949 and the Nationalist government’s contemporary retreat to Taiwan put into motion diasporic movements of missionaries and Chinese Christians out of Mainland China. As connections between global religious institutions and local groups were severed or radically transformed, vernacular visual materials of (and by) participants in this exodus represented nostalgic perceptions of lost historical possibilities. Moreover, in “freezing time,” these materials mediated imagined hopes for the survival of communities split by the Chinese Civil War and Cold War realignments in East Asia. This paper discusses recently-uncovered rare photographic sources produced by Jesuit priests who originated in the United States and camera-carrying Chinese families – all of whom were caught up in transitions from postwar China to new Taiwanese roots. I explore the evolution of these visual cultures in parallel with popular conceptions of Nationalist “Free China,” the “loss of China” in US consciousness, and contemporary negotiations of Taiwanese identities. Vernacular media and identities framed ground-level Taiwanese experiences between “Christian arcs of containment” and “wayfaring,” bridging national upheaval and communal diaspora. Emulations of photographer Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man, Cold War anticommunism, and the drive to humanize communal experiences in postcolonial Christian internationalism collectively colored the work of Jesuit photographers in 1950s–1970s Taiwan, much of which has not been widely seen until now. Private and public performances of image-making, religious projects, and family experiences and memories surface in the fragmentary afterlives of visual assemblages that emerged from this period. Together, such images and image-making are artifacts of futurity, created by transnational communities and projected onto their existences in an evolving Taiwan.

(Kindly Note: Joseph Ho is a presenter and co-organizer for this panel)