Abstract: This article examines the body in art and discusses environmental influences on body performance in contemporary Taiwanese art. The environmental elements under consideration include such factors as social, political, cultural, academic theories, and international trends. Because all these factors are intricately interconnected, they form cause and effect relationships that mutually affect one another. Through examining two generations of artists growing up in postwar Taiwan, this article parses their distinctive viewpoints on identities and memories, and their voices in different temporal and spatial continuums as represented in their artworks. This article focuses on the following six topics: “the insignificant body and subversive play,” “the dismantlement of the collective self,” “act of the re-conceptualized body,” “theorized body,” “stealth body,” and “the virtual realm as a source of origin.”

The conclusion utilizes the Chan concept of self to discuss how “the intrinsic identity” pursued by contemporary artists is in fact stimulated and shaped by external factors, and thus their attempt to seek personal liberation only results in being trapped in certain modes of thought, unable to break away from their limitations, and is not the true freedom and self-subjectivity that they had hoped for.