Hongjong Lin
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Centuries before modern-day fabulists like Jayson Blair and James Frey made headlines with their fictitious reporting, there was George Psalmanazar, an ersatz historian who took creative license to a new level. When Psalmanazar arrived in London in 1703, he presented himself as a native of Formosa (now known as Taiwan) who had been kidnapped and taken to Europe by Christian missionaries. He explained that his improbably pale skin and fair hair bore witness to his status as an upper-class Formosan who had been spared the indignity of toiling in the sun. Since very few Europeans at the time had ever seen an Asian, Psalmanazar soon found acceptance in literary London as a genuine exotic. He quickly parlayed this curiosity into star status with the 1704 publication of his An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, in which he painstakingly describes every detail of this faraway island – from its architecture, language and dress codes down to the way the natives cannibalized their young and somehow managed to read while sleeping. Replete with intricate maps, diagrams, and sketches of fantastical flora and fauna, the book was soon translated into French and German, and landed Psalmanazar a teaching gig at Oxford University.
Of course, it was just a dream; Psalmanazar was an incorrigible charlatan who had never been to Formosa, and his ruse was soon exposed. But his story lives on, which was reason enough for contemporary Taiwanese artist and curator Hongjong Lin to reappropriate this ancient tome, and in the process exhume its ancient author.
Since 2006, Hongjong Lin has been re-imagining Psalmanazar in a series of new guises, from architect to linguist. And in his video installation Yeeha Formosa (a pun on the original Portuguese name for the island), exhibited during the recent International Film Festival Rotterdam, Lin reinvented Psalmanazar as an international fashion designer. Psalmanazar’s sketches of the native Formosans found form as actual models parading in his apocryphal fashions. The installation itself is shrouded in mist, which enhances the idea of an unknowable locale. (Even three centuries after the publication of Psalmanazar’s book, Taiwan remains largely mysterious to occidental eyes, especially in terms of what Lin calls the island’s ‘unrecognizable political and cultural status.’)
Just as the reality of Formosa was infinitely malleable to Psalmanazar, so is the reality of Psalmanazar to Hongjohn Lin, whose latest incarnation of the faux Formosan will posit him as a real-estate broker during the inaugural Asia Triennial Manchester this April.
Douglas Heingartner
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