Taiwan Today

"Only Warhol and you could like the look of Taipei.”
     —David James, film theorist

"Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.”
     —Wallace Stevens, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating

What you want to do in the midst of all this controversy about Taipei’s architecture, is get on a bike and get off the main drags.

Residents of this congested capital may be proud of its New York “feel” on Nanking Road and the way stretches of Tunhua South conjure up a Park Avenue that never was, or how Jenai Circle glit­ters in the evening like a pricey plaza in Rome or Madrid. But in the main, like any modern metroplex, Taipei’s thorough­ fares are for getting, or trying to get, from place to place, and have those qualities of the practical that die for the eye on reviewing. Furthermore, they have given the city its reputation as an architectural hodgepodge, a mad mix of the old, the new and the pointless, and everything but the kitchen sink so long as it makes no aesthetic sense.

The metroplex, singled out by theo­rists as the quintessential Postmodern con­glomerate, is even ballyhooed as a warning of what’s to come for urban centers the world over. And people have used several somewhat less flattering epithets for the megamushroom in times gone by.

But in all these criticisms is explicit the attention the city gets, its cynosural and hypnotic effect, the importance of its look. In fact, that is what commentators agree upon: its visual importance. So we might do everyone concerned a favor by taking an actual look at the habitat.

Since driving requires several sets of peepers peeled to that oncoming lava called Taipei traffic, and walking is disgruntling in the close “air” and/or sur­round of unconscious peds, neither is a satisfactory get-around for a clear idea of the city. But if you don’t mind the rumble seat of a motorcycle or scooter or, better yet, the hard saddle of an old-fashioned pedlar, you’re in business. And while the cyclist looks truly intrepid in this traffic to those who don’t themselves indulge, every bike owner knows it’s the quickest way across town in rush hours—and at all times safer than it appears, as evidenced by how easily you can make eye contact with any motorist near you: meaning that unlike cities where cyclers are rare, drivers here almost always have you in their sights.

So off we go round the fairly com­pact metropolis—among major world­ destinies, Taipei’s city proper is relatively modest—to discover that its heterogene­ous appearance boasts a unity of scale, and a human one at that that may well be the envy of many a look-alike sky­scraping new Baghdad: and which scale has much to do with unifying what might otherwise be disparate styles. Nor is “style” adequate designation for the several civilized ideas that comprise and compete amongst its components: an almost too quaint Cathay that Hollywood painted for the world much as Joseph Conrad before it had given Europe and the States their notions of Asia, Russia, Africa, and Central America; a Gotham City springing whole from the pages of Batman Comics like Athena from the head of Zeus; and Japanese box-architec­ture as likely to move widthwise as high-rise. And these components, relaying each other for the sheer pleasure of it, often come down to a late deco look in insistingly simple, yet overwrought, cir­cles in a square and squares in a rectangle, a decodense as it were.

One of Hollywood’s duties during its recruitment in World War II was the encouraging of Americans to identify with the invaded Mainlanders against the common enemy. Several filmed versions of Pearl Buck novels had gotten this effort off to a good start. But one propaganda feat limned among my lasting impres­sions for its adroit alacrity is an entry called China (a title none could accuse of false modesty) with Alan Ladd, William Bendix, and Loretta Young. No sooner have the credits rolled than we are con­fronted with a panting Bendix dodging through a northern village under heavy blitz, only to stumble upon a howling, orphaned toddler. With bleeding heart, Brooklyn Bendix swoops the babe up from the rubble and goalposting toward some shelter or other is from this point unquestionably on the rough and tumble if bungling foster dad.

But the genius of this extended, mini­ mal-take sequence (a standard tour de force procedure for opening films in that era) is not so much the jump-start it gives to the plot as the ethos of peace, beauty, and tradition in flames which its exten­sive, busy set summons and illustrates: and which its charm and brushstroke detail define as “China” for a generation of exotica-hungry (read, escapist-prone) Americans. One of the surprises of Secret Taipei, and a well-guarded if senseless secret it is, is that the city is prototyped with enclaves redolent of this Holly­wood’s very vision of the Orient­—a vision imagined, storybook and utterly invented one would assume were he or she not to venture into Taipei’s back streets, there to discover that Tinseltown knew indeed whereof it spoke.

Try for samplings, for starters, the wall-to-wall restaurant rows ostensibly still standing (on expensive real estate) to accommodate the students of National Tai­wan Normal and National Taiwan U’s. Lungchuan Street and the lanes between it and Shihta Road, from Yunho to the wall of NTNU, have a movie-set facade so in extremis as to appear constructed for a big-budget musical rather than mere true­ life adventure. One tries to memorize every cobble, storefront, neon and nameplate.

Or the diagonal Lane 286 with its Sichuan, Shandong, and Honan eateries that cuts through Kungkuan from Roosevelt Road, Section 4, to Tingchou Road—a kaleidoscope of impression, aroma, and design so extravagantly ar­ticulated as to be incapable of staling, even if one gets a chance to pedal down it every night. But if you do, it’s worth tak­ing your bike to the end of Tingchou and halfway over Fuho Bridge: for the mid­-bridge commands a dazzling view of Mt. Goddess of Mercy, which is to say a land­scape painting of you-choose-your­-favorite dynasty, rising from the banks of the Hsintien, terrace by gardened terrace, to the temple that crowns this climbing village, truly the pastoral of a bygone era.

Or to single out but one narrow lane among hundreds that hark back centuries but are directly off a main artery, try Lane 51 on Linsen North Road: it needs a Delacroix to do it justice.

When you pedal past North Gate into the Tihua Street historic district, the on­-coming, forking and converging streets appear to construe no known logic. To find them a map, futilely you collect them in your thoughts. Still, their appeal is irre­sistible, a topography of the unconscious, and your progress, block after block, is fulfilling, is satisfaction, the pacifications of a voyage toward infancy, the sense and normalcy of a backthen and the urge to relive it, and/or the pleasure of just quite accidentally doing so. On Tihua Street, Section 1, you’ll want to look up, at the top floors, for graphics and roof-fronts traceable to Southern China in the Sung dynasty. No. 73 boasts a ginseng root in all its potent glory, but you don’t want to miss buildings 84, 88, 133, or 146 either. Best of all is 234, an empty but living collage with a tree growing out of its third floor facade like a horn, leafy, unicorn and defiant.

Then, if you turn your bike onto Kueite Street, which hugs the Tamsui River, just below Minsheng, the street’s east side will reward the most tiring bike trip. There you’ll spy several outdoor drains vertical to the buildings which for purely eye-pleasing reasons have been sculpted into giant bamboo stalks!

Elsewhere, among the startling his­torical oddities, is the decodent concoc­tion on the southwest corner of Hengyang Road and Huaining Street, directly oppo­site New Park’s northwest gate. And a few blocks from here the shabbily romantic vestiges of a kind of second­ class colonialism still stand, notably the original NTU Hospital replete with a European cupola-ceilinged rotunda lobby and tropical pool-garden atrium encir­cling a spouting fountain.

But if the incomprehensibly odd is your time-off intrigue, then the gigantic seafaring-lad high reliefs grimacing fero­ciously here and there about town should be on your agenda. In trying to invest them with purpose, one thinks of China Sea pirates: but these are so distinctly Nordic and Caribbean that one is unnerved, and that’s to say nothing of their menacing quality. Try the huge, slightly cross-eyed Viking head on Roosevelt opposite NTU and the mocking Treasure Island types threatening you from the Two Lions Building in the Lai Lai Department Store alley in Hsimenting, or the humongous defenestration on Sungchiang.

The Gotham City look is in the newer high-rises, of course, dotting the town’s east side. Some of the most recent towers, like Taipei Metro, obviate comment, be­ing as they are so very intentionally their imposing selves (read, money). But it is in the more approachable edifices, like 41­-43 Hsinhai Road, Section 2, with its Babylonian hanging gardens and the batmobile eccentricity on the southeast corner of Nanchang Road and Hoping West Road, or an armored, squat and confrontational, almost military-deco struc­ture like The Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering Building at NTU that one feels the unmis­takable spirit of Blade Runner’s architec­ture. That is to say, an idea of the modern seeming to leap from Batman strips and spiral forever toward the poisoned nightsky in the aforementioned film. Though the film’s sets were more than likely inspired by Tokyo (for Taipei would not have assumed its characteristic appearance by 1980 when Blade Runner was shot), yet this box-architecture, relentless and peeling but grittily-here, a standard contemporary Japanese conven­ience, is the city’s majority look.

Following Fredric Jameson’s attend­ance at a National Tsing Hua University conference, he produced an article, “Remapping Taipei,” that is largely respon­sible for the city now being read as the essential Postmodern metroplex and a fore­cast of the whole world’s future appear­ance and problems. In good theoretical follow-up, the island capital has become a vortex of international spacial attention, interest, and controversy. But I say the con­troversy may be largely a professional in­vention and to put it aside for the moment, unlock your bike, take it to the Parisian ambiance of Hsimenting's malls on a Sunday, and go round and round the postmodern pavements immersed in the pleasures of merely cycling.

Ronald Tavel is currently a Fulbright scholar assigned to National Taiwan University. He founded and named The Theatre of The Ridiculous, the only extant theatrical movement of the American 60s, and has written forty produced plays. He was Andy Warhol's screenwriter and in that capacity wrote and usually directed a baker's dozen films. Seven of these films were recently restored by The Whitney Museum of American Art and are now in international distribution.