Ko Nien-Pu "Flags,Transnational - Migrants and Outlaw Territories"

The Shibuya Incident took place in 1946 in Shibuya, Tokyo, was a violent confrontation between Taiwanese in Japan and police, this incident touched upon complicated identity and nationality issues at the jurisdiction between Taiwan, China, Japan and America, it has not only caught attention and aroused protest at the international level, but generated different discussions at the same time. It mapped out the poor, contention for space and anarchy situations under the postwar urban redevelopment projects, if urban as an actual political sphere, this incident at the same time marked the reconstruction of space and repartition of boundaries regardless of a postwar-colony or an empire, these migrants were forced into fractured and overstepped history, a bare life with no citizenship nor legal protection, if to review this under the Taiwan History, it is where the construction of Taiwanese identity first started and lead to the ambiguity as well as contradiction of Taiwanese identity later.

When personal emotion and identity fluctuate under the struggle between country and geopolitical region, this group of migrants sketched an alternative map of exile, through the transfiguration of country and borderline, affecting their map and route of shifting, as well the imagination of identity and emotional recognition of the moving subject, this imagined composition interweaved from geography and body, it kept circulating in the time of history duplicating its authority relation at the core and margin of the system. With these shifting and transforming spaces, in between overlapping dialectical relations of to and fro, similarities and differences, gaze and otherness, an alien land and homeland, how do they form identity through crossing borders and passing through it.