Playing a central role in daily life, ghost culture in East Asia has been deeply related to people’s identity, especially in Korea and Taiwan, two countries that modernized during the Japanese colonization before 1945. Beforehand, ghosts and spirits were unarchived. Japanese colonizers did the archiving and research into folklore, traditional religions, and spiritual culture. As a result, ghost stories become systematized in Korea and Taiwan—materializing ghosts into photos, books, and institutional research. The act of archiving and writing a ghosts, was part of a colonial policy to conquer both territories not only physically, but also spiritually. This colonialist act of archiving, as part of the modernization process with its institutional power, the diversity of ghost culture as the peculiar collective memory became generalized by the hegemony of civilization. Unruly ghosts, traditional beliefs, and folk culture have been stigmatized as a pre-modernist cultural phenomenon, along with so-called non-scientific, anti-modernistic, benighted things. The ghost is spread through spoken language and has no form. In the process of archiving, the process of writing a ghost, it attains a certain shape. Looking at ghosts and spirituality in terms of technologies of mediation: ghosts simulate and stimulate other levels of reality, a meta-level of society. The ghost marks the limit of a society, and the narrative of the ghost is deeply tied to individual communities. The ghost is left as a collective memory or inscription of the past. In order to open the possibility of new forms and new interpretations of the ghost as a social mediator or simulator, we brought our interrogations to the Maastricht public by screening, discussing, and performing the ghost. How, then, can we use the ghost as a social medium that is strongly engaged with the local community? Exchanging, materializing, visualizing, and discussing ghost stories, we want to celebrate the role of the ghost in a range of East Asian cultures. In different contexts, ghost stories can be as widespread as collective memories in community formation. These collective stories that you would not usually reveal to others will highlight the hidden narratives of other parts of the world, and generate shared moments of cooperative imagination. Post Ghost Bust is an extension of our research publication into a workshop, screening, and symposium about the figure of the ghost in East Asia. It opens our questions about ghosts and their link to colonial modernity, folk culture, and the collective imagination, to the public.
Jhen Chen 陳臻 is a designer and visual artist bases in Taiwan and the Netherlands. Chen's recent works examine the representation of colonial oppression in contemporary society through books and multimedia. She was a participant of the Jan van Eyck Academie from 2018 to 2019. Chen's publications have won awards such as the ‘De Best Verzorgde Boeken’ and the ‘Golden Butterfly Award’ (Best Book Design in Taiwan) and have been exhibited internationally. She is also one of the founder of the platform “Limestone Books” in Maastricht.