Chimera Literary Salon| Eastern Taipei vs. Western Taipei: The Cultural Battleground of Du Lian Kui, Edward Yang, and the Cult of Youthful Beauty

‍Event Content

Da-Hong Wang, Taiwan’s first-generation postwar architect, spent a decade transposing Oscar Wilde’s classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray from Victorian London to Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s, rewriting it as Du Lian-Kui for his own era. Through this temporal displacement, Wang not only presents a universal allegory of human nature but also embeds his aesthetic reflections and observations of Taipei within the novel’s narrative. In 2021, this work was published through a collaborative effort between the Winsing Arts Foundation and the Society for Research and Preservation of Wang Da-hong's Architecture.

For this lecture series, the Foundation specially invited Chia-Hsien Yang (writer and Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Tsing Hua University) to curate the program. Analyzing from a literary perspective, she introduces Du Lian-Kui to contemporary Taiwan and discusses the significance of reading classic works for modern readers. Simultaneously, by examining Wang’s reflections on his era revealed in the work, she guides participants to “approach Da-Hong Wang” from perspectives beyond architecture.

The fourth lecture features Ying-Fen Chen (Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, National Taipei University of Technology) and Po-Ching Chen (novelist), who will discuss the portrayal of Taipei’s East and West Districts in the novel Du Lian-Kui. The discussion then extends to the imagery of the East and West Districts in Edward Yang’s films, Terrorizers and Taipei Story, and in Taiwanese gay literature (echoing Dorian Gray, the beautiful youth).

From West to East, from London to Taipei, Du Lian-Kui transplants the lived experiences and sensibilities of the other through rewriting. Da-Hong Wang, in turn, reexamines his own “East-West fusion” cultural identity, reflecting on issues of cultural recognition, identity, belonging, difference, and competition in the clash between self and other. He hopes that upon finishing Du Lian-Kui, readers will appreciate the profound depth of each culture through their reflections.