Hu Ching-fang, writer and arts ambassador from Taiwan to France
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“In a way, this crisis is a good thing. The whole world begins to think. » The crisis evoked by Hu Ching-fang, director of the Cultural Center of Taiwan in France, is the one that has been agitating his country since the beginning of August with the start of military maneuvers by the People’s Republic of China in the waters that surround it. The neighboring giant poses the threat of a war that could put an end to the independence of the island of 23 million inhabitants.
Hu Ching-fang attends military escalation from afar. This 53-year-old writer has been working for a year in Paris, at the Taipei Representative Office in France, in the 7e borough. The equivalent of an embassy, the country being recognized by only fourteen States, of which France is not a part. The director is responsible for promoting Taiwanese culture in all its aspects.
“My role is to prove that even in turbulent weather, we remain reliable and moderate partners. » Hu Ching Fang
Objective: to differentiate itself from China. And defend the democratic and progressive values that the island wishes to embody, in particular under the aegis of President Tsai Ing-wen. In power since 2016, it has made culture a matter of state, unlike its communist rival, where private foundations are in the majority. “We have built our democracy and our prosperity under the threat of war for eighty years, we are used to crisesreassures Hu Ching-fang, serene. My role is to prove that even in turbulent weather, we remain reliable and moderate partners. »
Transgressing this simple protocol role
It is up to him to defend the Taiwanese arts and to show that his country is not only that of the “made in Taiwan”, associated in the collective imagination with the electronics industry. As such, the director supports the work of artists, cartoonists, filmmakers or visual artists through exhibitions, conferences-debates or festivals. Some receive financial support to settle in France, others are invited by European museums.
A writer first and foremost, Hu Ching-fang often admits to transgressing this simple formal role. It is not uncommon to come across her at a table in the company of artists of multiple origins at La Coupole, a brasserie in the Montparnasse district popular with the small Parisian cultural milieu. A way to establish a bond of trust with its interlocutors.
Artists CHENG Ting-ting, LU Zih-rong and WU Tzu-an, currently in residence at the Cité internationale des arts… https://t.co/d31hya0hZH
This is the case with Eric Faye, author of Nagasaki (I read), Grand Prize for the novel of the French Academy in 2010. Freshly returned from a writing residency in Taiwan, he salutes the benevolence of the director of the center. ” Madame Hu embodies the kindness specific to her people, she represents a Taiwanese literature that shares with us the questions of the modern world. In his twelfth book, Islands (not translated into French), Grand Prize for the Novel of the Taipei International Book Fair 2020, the author describes an island floating above a collapsing world. An island, like that of Taiwan, whose inhabitants are bound by a social contract, “rather than by history, blood or religion”, she explains. Between the lines, the writer has a very clear purpose: to make people understand the absolute necessity of cultivating the diversity of cultures, starting with those of Taiwan.
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