20110303 Outsourcing history is problematic

Outsourcing history is problematic

By Yeh Hung-ling 葉虹靈

The new permanent exhibition of the Taipei 228 Memorial Hall has come under fire recently by certain civic groups and relatives of victims of the massacre, who say it distorts history and portrays someone who was essentially a dictator in glowing terms. Both the curator and the hall’s management wrote to newspapers, pointing their finger at each other and defending their own positions.

This takes us back to late 2009, when an artwork at the Jingmei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, another facility dealing with a painful part of Taiwan’s history — the White Terror — was destroyed. Both the park’s director and the artist took their version of events to the papers.

I am happy that Taiwan has become a country in which justice is applied and sites of historical consequence are conserved. However, these problems highlight inherent problems in the way the nation’s museums are run.

The 228 Incident and the ensuing decades-long White Terror are scars on Taiwan’s history that have yet to heal. When Taiwan became a democracy, the central and local governments allocated resources for the establishment of a memorial hall and a cultural park for the 228 Incident and the White Terror, as demanded by the public.

In addition to the 228 Memorial Hall in Taipei, there is also now the National 228 Memorial Museum, which opened on Sunday on the 64th anniversary of the incident.

Responsibility for commemorating the victims of the White Terror is to be handed to a planned national human rights museum under the yet-to-be established ministry of culture, a merger of the Jingmei and Green Island human rights cultural parks that are now run by the Council for Cultural Affairs.

The problem with these museums and cultural parks is the restrictions placed on them, and the lack of specialist curatorial and research personnel that other established museums, such as the National Museum of Taiwan History, the National Museum of History, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature or even the National Palace Museum have. This forces them to rely on outsourcing for virtually all their exhibitions, both the permanent displays and fixed-term theme shows or special exhibits — everything from the planning stages to the eventual implementation.

Whether or not the museum’s own unified vision is reflected in the work of all the different contractors depends on the quality of their work and how each individual project is judged.

The new National 228 Memorial Museum will be run by the 228 Memorial Foundation. The foundation was originally established to handle compensation payments to victims of the 228 Incident or their survivors and was supposed to be a temporary group. It has had to re-invent itself as a permanent institution charged with the long-term running of the memorial. It is not clear what personnel arrangements have been made to deal with this change, or whether there are to be any professional researchers or exhibition planners on staff. Perhaps it will keep the same modus operandi as other culture parks, commissioning private companies to do the bulk of the work.

The management of the Green Island and Jingmei cultural parks has gone through several changes over the years, too, and the procurement of exhibits and curating has been outsourced to various private contractors. In the past, when little attention was paid to the White Terror, civic groups saved a lot of valuable historical artifacts and documents.

Unfortunately, the lack of continuity in government policy has meant that this information does not get exhibited and our understanding of the White Terror period remains fragmentary. Exhibitions, when held, have failed to fulfill their pedagogical function.

Interested parties have no way of knowing whether the planned national human rights museum will cut the mustard in terms of its research, collection, exhibition and education responsibilities. All we can hope for is that when it comes to the draft legislative review, the public can participate in the debates and monitor the proposals.

The government has been trying to streamline public organizations, encouraging greater private participation. The pros and cons of public museums outsourcing their operations, either in full or in part, or of contracting out specific functions, has been debated at length by those in the museum industry. The general consensus is that the desirability and appropriateness of outsourcing depends on the nature of the museum.

However, we are specifically talking about a memorial hall or museum designed to record the historical development of the local populace, for being a public forum for educating the public about the place in which they live, allowing them to reflect on democracy, history and human rights, an educational venue in which ethnic groups in possession of diverse historical memories can come together and engage. We are also talking of the government’s responsibilities in the creation and maintenance of that.

We might want to start thinking about whether we still want to hand the responsibility for researching and discovering historical truths, conserving the collective memory of a society, and even getting to the bottom of contentious events, to outside contractors.

Yeh Hung-ling is executive secretary of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation.