The result of global capital movements and tilts According to the statistics of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Education, there are currently 170,000 married new immigrants from Southeast Asia in Taiwan, and about 110,000 enrollees from the second generation of the Southeast Asian new immigrants. However, the present general discussions on the relevant fields concerning new immigrants still tend to be unfolded from the culture-based point of view, and the interest in the second generation of new immigrants focuses more on the possibility to transform their language advantages into economic contributions than the converations about the multicultural and historical aspects from Southeast Asia. Reviewing the social development over the past 30 years, there is an inevitable relation between transnational migrations and the changes of the global economic structure. In the 1980’s, Taiwan entered the global capital system and increased the investment proportion in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile the marriage immigrants from Southeast Asian countries began to come to Taiwan as well. In the 1990’s, the labor-intensive industries of Taiwan migrated massively to mainland China and Southeast Asia. At the same time, the industrial structure in many countries were also changing gradually, therefore the marriage immigration has become one of the ways in which people change their life in the capital marginalized conditions. The transnational migration of marriage immigrants relates closely to the political, economic and environmental changes, and the cultures of their origins and their individual memories are supposed to be one of the accesses for us to understand them.
Family Memo from Hometown and Foreign Land The exhibition is divided in the three subsections: “Island of Migration”, “Family Memo” and “Hometown Landscape,” extending from people’s move and migration to the individual life stories. In “Island of Migration” is Kuo Yu-Ping invited, who takes home and memories as her creative core over a long period of time. Kuo reinterprets the sensitive landscape in the memories of new immigrant women with the acoustic poetry composed of sculpture and sound installation. In “Family Memo,” Chen Han-Yu goes back to Indonesia with her friend who has been in Taiwan since almost 20 years but never returned to the hometown, and she uses Karaoke combining video documentations to reconnect the individual life stories with the land; The director Nguyen Kim-hong lenses the unknown homesickness of those Vietnamese sisters who married abroad in Taiwan. In the section of “Hometown Landscape,” via the work directed by Tsai Tsung-lung we can visually perceive the relationship between the second generation of new immigrants and their mothers’ hometown, and the dual cultural state which took root in their lives. Composed of new immigrants, TASAT Theater states their status in Taiwan in the piece “Seeing Us”. This exhibition is titled as “Family Memo,” aims not only to touch the families of Southeast Asian new immigrants in Taiwan, but hopefully to take their hometowns as the starting point for the understanding between each other.