Gaze: The Cultural Gene of Taiwanese Aesthetics
Ingrid Chiang
Taiwanese aesthetics are often conflated with notions of beauty and lacking a theoretical foundation. Gaze: The Cultural Gene of Taiwanese Aesthetics showcases Taiwan’s visual lexicon through examples of culture, history, and everyday life.
The book examines Taiwanese aesthetics along three analytical axes: the stratification of aesthetic orientations in culture, design as a historical and ideological mediator, and the phenomenology of aesthetics in daily life. This organization allows for a better understanding of how these aesthetics are identified, shaped, and experienced, historicizing Taiwan’s aesthetic trajectory while interrogating its entanglements with colonial histories, national identity formation, and the globalization of visual culture.
The book’s visual design draws from historical Taiwanese printed matter and graphic styles, integrating them into a contemporary layout. The book transforms research findings into a tangible reading experience, inviting readers to encounter Taiwan’s past aesthetics in dialogue with present-day visual language.
By challenging prevailing reductionist interpretations, this thesis reconceptualizes Taiwanese aesthetics as a cultural language that is lived, spoken, and shaped through everyday practices, local environments, and historical layers. It views aesthetics as an embodied way of relating to the world, rooted in daily life and the materiality of place. It asserts that aesthetics, when examined as a national and sociopolitical construct, function as a formative mechanism in shaping collective perception, reinforcing ideological structures, and negotiating Taiwan’s place within transnational discourses.