Making material memories: Kinmen’s bridging objects and fractured places between China and Taiwan

Introduction

This article looks at the transformations and afterlives of defunct military stuff ¹ as they embody a ruptured past. By situating in the wider context of ‘difficult heritage’, ² these artefacts form manifestations of a post-conflict society by materialising the recent past. ³ This article follows the matériel culture of conflict ⁴ through attempts to tame its violent associations to trace its continued unruliness. In particular, it looks at the affordances of different materials for different forms and different degrees of malleability of memory. It does this through the case of a former military outpost – Kinmen Island (between China and Taiwan) – which only recently found itself at the centre (both metaphorically and literally) of what we might call ‘rapprochement tourism’ where travel between former enemies is supposed to lead to increased international harmony. More specifically, we shall examine steel knives made from artillery shell cases and a music festival staged in a defunct military tunnel carved out of solid rock. As such, the aim is to ‘place matter in question’ ⁵ as vehicle for memory. This article forms part of a larger project on the cultural geopolitics of cross-strait tourism, which is based on ethnographic field research undertaken in Kinmen in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2011. Materials for this piece were drawn from in-depth interviews with a Kinmen Knife blacksmith and the artistic director of the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival, participant observation at attractions and shops and semi-structured interviews with both Chinese and Taiwanese tourists.

Politically belonging to Taiwan, Kinmen forms an illuminating case study of contested memories and fractured places, being located 350 km south-west of Taipei but a mere 10 km from the city of Xiamen in the People’s Republic of China (Figure 1). The island became a military stronghold of the Kuomintang’s (KMT) Nationalist Army after its forces retreated from mainland China during the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1949. It was the site of ferocious battles to stop the PLA from taking Taiwan and thus a frontline in the global Cold War. With the end of the Cold War, the democratisation of Taiwan and the opening of China, Kinmen has experienced gradual de-militarisation. Martial law on the island was lifted in 1992, and direct travel between mainland China and Kinmen re-opened upon the establishment of the ‘Mini Three Links’ in 2001. ⁶ Owing to its strategic location, Kinmen once again finds itself at the centre of cross-strait relations, but this time as the staging post either for Taiwanese businessmen tapping into the Chinese market or for Chinese tourists seeking cheaper flights to Taiwan, as part of rapprochement tourism.

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Figure 1.

Location of Kinmen.

Remnants of conflict and defunct military infrastructures are now preserved and reused for a thriving battlefield tourism industry that has created many innovative products from the Kinmen Knives studied here to battlefield-themed food and beverages. ⁷ Things of all different substances and sizes have been conscripted for and now enable battlefield heritage tourism. Importantly, the demands of rapprochement tourism entangle touristic consumption and commerce with the realm of social memory. Souvenirs and mementos have been seen as, what Hetherington ⁸ called ‘praesentia’, where the persistence of objects, even in destruction, is part of ‘the ways in which people manage absence within social relations’ creating the presence of the absence or haunting from the past. However, in this article, we seek to restore a livelier dimension to things from and of the past. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s ⁹ classic text introduced the communicative ability of objects. We deploy their concept of ‘psychic transactions’ to capture the affective energy of communication between things and humans in heritage tourism. In general, accounts of tourism have tended to be object poor, but here we stress that tourism depends on touristic things as they facilitate interactions between and among local people and tourists. The objects work through a variety of senses beyond just the visual – evoking a sensuous materialism. Every ‘memorial entails a visceral and sensuous experience’ if it is to succeed in affecting people. ¹⁰ For example, Macdonald ¹¹ explored the enduring agency of the stones of the Zeppelin Building (at the former Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg) to ‘speak’ to humans. For her, the stone whose material affordances had promised enduring meaning for the building offered more ambiguous aesthetic appeals in a state of decay. The cross communication of senses and things is then dependent on their insertion in the flow of history so the sensory landscape bears within it emotional and historical sedimentation. ¹² However, we suggest that there is something more in a wider sensoria than that upon which Macdonald focuses. For one, touching materials, even those as apparently inert as stone, form a reversible relationship between things and humans. Things are not merely objects on which meaning and action are inscribed by humans. Taking his lead from Merleau-Ponty, Tilley ¹³ describes the materiality of stone thus:

In the process of touching an object . . . [a] reversibility of sensation/perception can be posited to be at work. I touch the stone and the stone touches me . . . Touching the stone is possible because both my body and the stone are part of the same world. There is in this sense a relation of identity and continuity between the two.

The sense of touch from stone is distinct, and we shall see multiple – as it touches us directly or through acoustics. Objects are seen here as being able to do something, ‘to perform actions, produce effects, and alter situations’. ¹⁴ This follows Bennett’s ¹⁵ notion of ‘vital materialism’:

By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.

In the context of Kinmen, objects associated with its battlefield heritage are animated with spirits of the past and are constantly in conversations with their makers, local people and tourists, creating affective experiences and structuring the consciousness of other actors and actants of the battlefield tourism landscape. In the next section, we revisit the debate surrounding post-war commemorative materialities in light of such a sensuous materialism to ask its implications for a ‘sensorial anthropology’ ¹⁶ and sensuous scholarship. ¹⁷

Materialising memories: ‘Trench Art’ and commemoration in post-war landscapes

War objects may be small, e.g. a bullet; intermediate, e.g. a tank; or large, e.g. a whole battlefield landscape. All share the defining characteristic of being the product of human action rather than natural processes. Thus, the Western Front of the First World War is as much an artefact as a portable war souvenir, a Second World War V2 rocket, the symbolic terrain of war memorials, or the ‘Cross’ formed by remaining structural elements in the ruins of the World Trade Centre. ¹⁸

Literature on war commemoration has often focused on official monuments. ¹⁹ More lately, accounts have broadened to include battlefield relics and memorabilia, which can circulate beyond the site of conflict where their making/buying/giving and their travels foster an instability in values and meanings through time and space. Themes surrounding war commemoration have been extensively discussed in works related to major global conflict. ²⁰ Less has been said with regard to memorialising the Cold War, though some studies have highlighted the awkward persistence of structures designed for indestructibility. ²¹ The civil war between China and Taiwan has scarcely been examined and offers a ‘hot’ Cold War conflict.

We take inspiration from Nicholas Saunders’ analysis of Trench Art ²² that re-evaluates ‘the role of material culture as multi-vocal representational embodiments of war’. ²³ He defines Trench Art as ‘any item made by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians, from war matériel directly, or any other material, as long as it and they are associated temporally and/or spatially with armed conflict or its consequences’. ²⁴ Although Saunders ²⁵ thus shows the resignification of the desiderata of war, objects function as largely passive surfaces on which meaning is inscribed. This article follows his broader definition of matériel culture by examining how things from and of a past generation continue to act in contemporary consumption practices, and how, instead of being ‘cast in stone’, meanings of such artefacts are always in a state of becoming rather than being. In developing this angle, we distinguish between the physicality and materiality of an object, that are all too often elided in calls to ‘rematerialise’ research in cultural geography. ²⁶ What is created are ‘configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-emerging interactions’. ²⁷ Therefore, we argue that materiality is a medium through which interactions between people and things take place, and it is taken to refer to the tangibility and composition of things that evokes the various senses of vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. As such, this article contends that the materialities of the battlefield past are not dead and cold but are in fact lively and restless in their current interaction with humans. In other words, instead of presuming that things are vehicles for meanings inscribed onto them, it sees the materiality of things as able to foster meanings that exceed those inscriptions. In this sense, Massumi argues that materials are ‘self-disclosing’ rather than a passive object awaiting discovery. For him, both material and social elements allow an unpredictable surplus and the emergence of novelty. ²⁸

The relationship of material endurance and memory is, therefore, not simple. At one level, most monuments are materially designed to perdure, and carrying memories through time is often associated with object endurance. ²⁹ Conversely, the gradual or sudden loss and destruction of an object can be what creates the affective charge. ³⁰ Or indeed, it can be the material melding of elements, such as parts of different ships in Stanley Bleifeld’s statue The Lone Sailor ³¹ or the soils of different provinces in Hans Haacke’s Bundestag work. ³² Once moved beyond their original setting, physically, temporally or socially, the constellation of meanings that artefacts conjure also change. For instance, Harrison ³³ explores the changing meanings to war veterans of mementos taken from the enemy dead as war trophies and traces the later desire to return such artefacts to the original owners’ surviving kin as a form of reconciliation laying memories to rest. Alternatively, the hot and lustrous qualities of fresh shrapnel was what gave valency to anti-aircraft shrapnel collected by British children in the Second World War; as the material cooled, so too its value drained away. ³⁴ Such labile commemorative materialities and their associations with memory (un)making are what this article attempts to explicate.

Saunders ³⁵ offers a more prescriptive temporal trajectory based on First World War Trench Art. His discussion provides a narrative of the loss of authenticity and the original feelings of Trench Art as they are commodified through tourism:

Burgeoning number of battlefield visitors saw an increase in the popularity of all kinds of Great War memorabilia and the ever popular decorated shell cases became a mainstay of the militaria trade. Most have had their original meanings displaced by a market whose fluctuating prices reflect the classificatory confusion which surrounds them. Regarded variously as antiques, militaria, souvenirs, bric-a-brac and curios, the qualities of completeness, distinctiveness and shiny appearance have replaced earlier emotional values. ³⁶

The general move from folk production to commerce is important to note. However, by privileging and authenticating Trench Art produced by people who, and artefacts which, are closer to the conflict in a temporal sense, he downplays the creativity of later producers and affective power of later products. As this article will show, post-war commemorative materialities of the Kinmen Knife and the Tunnel Music Festival can be equally powerful in their ability to interact with people and to awake their consciousness about Kinmen’s turbulent past and contemporary cross-strait ties. Indeed, ‘recognizing the multiple temporalities of the material culture of war and the contingent relation of military material culture to conflict is an important step for the development of the field’. ³⁷

The focus on materiality means attending not just to objects but to situated encounters. This moves us from a predominantly visual analysis to attend to all the senses through which people interact with artefacts. ³⁸ Indeed, it is the tactility and portability of Trench Art that creates its intimate and affective appeal:

Paintings and memorials represented war from a distance, spatially and temporally. They connected through impressions, possessing little or no sensuous or tactile immediacy. By contrast, metal Trench Art was made from the waste of war, its varied forms incorporating the agents of death and mutilation directly. Anonymously responsible for untold suffering and bereavement, expended shells, bullets and shrapnel were worked into a variety of forms, engaging visual, olfactory, tactile, and sometimes auditory senses, as well as memory. ³⁹

The result might be considered as ‘proximal nonrepresentational forms of knowledge’ ⁴⁰ that are performative and in process rather than visual or distal forms of knowledge of separated objects that reconfirm our self or other boundaries. Such a sensuous materialism and its affective communication ⁴¹ overflow to current times and spaces. Saunders notes that it is the physicality and nature of metal Trench Art that makes it ‘a unique mediator between men and women, soldier and civilian, individual and industrialized society, the nations which fought the war, and, perhaps most of all, between the living and the dead’. ⁴² But how then do different materialities of artefacts and encounters with them mediate or even animate such relationships? Artefacts are encountered in and through material spaces and contexts of local epistemologies and sensory regimes. ⁴³ As such, ‘sensuous materialism’ attempts to see the different senses as channels through which the materiality of an object interacts with people and creates effects. The ensuing sections will bring on the ‘Trench Art’ in question, namely, the Kinmen Knife and the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival, and discuss the commemorative materialities each possesses in affecting visitors sensuously.

Making objects of memory: from artillery shells to household knives

The August 23rd Artillery Bombardment marked the beginning of the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The artillery battle lasted for 44 days during which an estimated total of 475,000 artillery shells fell on Kinmen and its surrounding islets. Intermittent shelling continued for the next 10 years. This bombardment is recycled, and its memory perpetuated through the Kinmen Knife (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Kinmen Knife in various forms ranging from the traditional Chinese cleavers to multi-purpose and sashimi knives.

Figure 2 shows the Kinmen Knife in its various guises, ranging from Chinese cleavers to multi-purpose and sashimi knives. Manufactured using artillery shell cases and fragments (Figure 3) from the bombardment, the Kinmen Knife is one of the most sought after souvenirs by visitors to Kinmen. It is the icon of the island and is often featured in media reports and documentaries by the likes of CNN, NHK from Japan and international magazines, to the extent that Wu Tseng-Dong, Director of Chin Ho Li (one of today’s leading knife manufacturers) argued, ‘Today, when people think of Kinmen, they will think of the Kinmen Knife’. Recalling its origins, he recounted,

I survived the war years as a child. We were so helpless when the artillery shells came. But when we got used to the bombing, we could estimate where the shells landed and decide whether to take cover in the tunnel or not. When things got quiet, some of us would go in search for the shell fragments to be used as raw materials for our knives . . . The kitchen knife is used in every household . . . both in China and Taiwan. I want to remind people of the great sufferings caused by the war. At the same time, this common household item would also remind the users of the kinship and culture that both sides share. We are ultimately one family.

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Figure 3.

Making the Kinmen Knife amid a dump of artillery shell cases.

Recycling the artillery shell cases and fragments is an attempt to reclaim a sense of control over a weapon of mass destruction that ruptured the lives of so many. Concurrently, this can also be seen as a way to seek closure to the persisting unrest and conflict between the two sides. Simultaneously, there is a yearning for peaceful reconciliation to be reflected in and enabled by manufacturing something from the debris of war. The knife is placed in the hearth of a family that was literally as well as figuratively divided by the conflict. Indeed, ‘the meanings people give to things are part and parcel of the same meanings that they give to their lives’. ⁴⁴ Nevertheless, in his domestication of a weapon into an everyday household item, Wu is not quite ready to completely silence its materiality. A half-knife half-artillery shell stood stoutly on a display cabinet in his shop (Figure 4). It seems to suggest the reincarnation of the dead and corroded shell case into a knife of hope that breathes new life into cross-strait ties. The Kinmen Knife, considering the very material that it is made from, is inextricably linked to the ‘sufferings caused by the war’. Yet, such commemorative materiality seeks not to remember but to forget. Unlike the various official war memorials constructed by the Ministry of Defence to convey nationalist ideologies, ⁴⁵ the artillery shell case, stripped of its ability to cause destruction, seeks to sublate past atrocities and hostilities in its reincarnation as an everyday household item. The knife takes on a new role, however, to ‘remind the users of the kinship and culture that both sides share’.

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Figure 4.

Half-knife half-artillery shell display.

During the martial law years up till 1992, Wu’s main customers were the garrison. Soldiers serving on the island would buy a knife or two to take back to Taiwan when they completed their tour of duty. Subsequently, through word of mouth, the popularity of the Kinmen Knife grew. With the gradual demilitarisation of Kinmen, the main clientele shifted to being tourists from both mainland Taiwan and China. Although the Kinmen Knife remains the same, as a souvenir, it has been invested with different meanings by its buyers. Following Susan Stewart, souvenirs work to remember ‘events whose materiality has escaped us’. ⁴⁶ For the returning soldier, the Kinmen Knife when brought home served as both a closure and continuity of his military experience. It was a piece of the war, a fragment from a weapon of mass destruction that might have killed him. Possessing or giving the Kinmen Knife, thus, was an extension of himself; ⁴⁷ it was a performance of victory over death. For Taiwanese tourists, the island of Kinmen was a mystery throughout the martial law years – long heard of but never visited. It was only with the end of martial law on the island that the first tours began. To tourists, the Knife serves as a memorial token ‘of a spatially and temporally distanced landscape’. ⁴⁸ For mainland Chinese visitors, they were curious about the island’s ability to withstand the artillery bombardment during the war years. It was almost a mystery that the PLA failed to capture this small isolated island. One Chinese tourist at the Chin Ho Li store shared,

I’ve heard of the Kinmen Knife even before I reached Kinmen. It’s so popular in Xiamen. It is so surreal to touch these knives and to know that they are actually made from artillery shells that were fired from our side. But it’s not sensitive now . . . we are already at peace and we are buying the knife as a souvenir.

The purchasing of a knife, made from artillery shells fired from Mainland China authenticates the Chinese tourists’ battlefield borderland or frontier experience, reinstantiates the history and yet transcends it. Referring to his Chinese customers, Wu commented,

The artillery shell fragment represents war and cruelty, but now we use it to make something that is heart-warming . . . a household item. It represents a transition from war to peace. You see, it was originally a war item. Now there are Chinese tourists. They come and would find this knife interesting . . . it can be a souvenir or used at home. The knife is made from artillery shells fired by them. And now, in times of peace, they are bringing these back.

The ‘returning’ of the artillery shells reflects a conversation that is ongoing among the Knife, its maker and its users. The material and texture of the Knife speaks of its life story – a biography that very much centres on the intractable conflict across the strait. The materiality of the Knife thus acts as a platform for him to remind the Chinese tourists of the atrocities caused by war. The knife is a ‘precipitate of re-memory’ ⁴⁹ as recollections of the conflict as experienced elsewhere, not just the bombardment of the island, are stimulated through the sight, touch and density of everyday encounters. As such objects are not just symbols of a social group ‘but may themselves be constitutive of a certain social relation’. ⁵⁰

So far, we have focused on the interactions between humans and objects. The Kinmen Knife, its maker and users are involved in what Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton ⁵¹ call ‘psychic activities or transactions’. According to them, ‘Objects are not static entities whose meaning is projected on to them from cognitive functions of the brain or from abstract conceptual systems of culture’ but are ‘objectified forms of psychic energy’. ⁵² The idea of ‘psychic energy’ within the transactions between persons and things recognises the liveliness of things. The question is, if the Kinmen Knife is alive and energetic, does its conversation with the maker remain the same ever since its reincarnation? Wu reflected how its significance had changed for him:

In the past, we did not think too much about the symbolism of the knife. During the war years, people went around to collect shell fragments to sell for money. It was a matter of surviving and earning some cash. We bought the fragments and turned them into knives and sold them. It was for the money too. We basically needed to make a living during those difficult times . . . But in recent years, cross-strait relations have become more amicable. And there has been a more economic focus to cross-strait ties over the past ten years. So gradually, we started to associate our knife with the promotion of peace across the strait.

Here, then the symbolic charge of the knife increases rather than diminishes over time. This is not personally aestheticised trench art becoming monetised but a scrap commodity becoming aestheticised. The economic value of shell fragments has always been prioritised, and the psychic transactions between the Kinmen Knife and its maker have changed over time with the evolving geopolitical situation. The language has metamorphosed from one of ‘survival’ and ‘making a living’ to one of ‘promoting peaceful cross-strait ties’. Contrasting with Saunders’ ⁵³ attempt to classify memorial tokens into three manufacturing periods, each dominated by a certain group of makers and genre of artefact, the materiality of the Kinmen Knife overflows temporal and spatial boundaries. Through engaging its maker and users in different psychic interactions, the Knife effectively adapts to the unstable cultural–geopolitical climate, renews its identity, embodies changing ideologies and shapes the identities of its users so as to survive through the years and even ‘travel’ beyond the border. As such, it is important to appreciate the trajectories of things, and to interrogate and capture materiality in action, and how meanings are always in a state or flux of emergence.

The recycling of the shell cases and fragments into household knives materialises war time memories. Waste produced by such a lethal entity that cost the lives of so many becomes reincarnated into an ambassador of goodwill between China and Taiwan. Handling and touching the Kinmen Knife renders present both the tumultuous past and a relatively cordial present across the Taiwan Strait. As such, the knives have a biography of changing values and attitudes attached to them by different people over time ⁵⁴ and, we would add, space. Yet, such a biography is a messy one as the Kinmen Knife fuses sentiments of war and peace, and it juxtaposes presence and absence at once. Perhaps, the half-knife, half-artillery shell that resides in Wu’s shop says it best: there is no clear demarcation of where the shell ends and where the knife starts. The Kinmen Knife is as much possessed by the spirits of the past as it is an embodiment of a potentially promising peaceful future.

Memory soundscapes: the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival

After the artillery bombardment in 1958, the military constructed underground tunnels so as to preserve their combat capability. Conceived in 1961 and completed in 1966, the Zhaishan Tunnel and its water passage (Figure 5) lead directly from the inner land to the ocean. Its ‘A-shaped’ waterway is 357 m long, 11.5 m wide and 8 m high and provided shelter for some 42 small naval vessels. The tunnel also has a wharf that served as a base for shipment of military supply. Abandoned underground structures have an especial allure of uncovering the hidden, ⁵⁵ and defunct military structures also have been noted to be marked by soundscapes that either amplify the dislocation from or make present the past deadly purposes of the sites. ⁵⁶ After the martial law period and the gradual demilitarisation of the island, the tunnel gained an ideological function of relaying nationalist ideologies to the younger generations of Taiwanese as it was transformed into a site for national education. When asked about their recollections of Kinmen’s war-related landscape, locals will often reminisce about school trips to the various military installations and museums, especially during National Day celebrations. The hegemonic narrative surrounding Zhaishan Tunnel emphasises the valour of the nationalist soldiers and their determination to defend Kinmen against the communists at all costs. ⁵⁷

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Figure 5.

Zhaishan Tunnel.

This public discourse is still very much alive in the present day where ‘underground Kinmen’ produced by this ‘tunnelisation’ has been developed into a valuable tourism resource. In the tunnel, tourists get to see the living quarters of soldiers and the carved surfaces of granite gneiss. Tour guides ritualistically emphasise the ‘almost impossible task of excavating through the solid granite’ and the ‘sufferings that soldiers experienced during the round-the-clock construction’. Tourists are encouraged to ‘touch the granite structure, breathe in the dense air and imagine how life was like for the soldiers during the war’. One local official explained,

We want to let the tourists understand better the hardship suffered by our soldiers, and for the young Taiwanese to realise how much their forefathers had gone through. Without Kinmen, there is no Taiwan. So, by converting it [the tunnel] to a tourist site, they can see it for themselves . . . more effective than textbook [knowledge].

The presentation to tourists aims to ‘raise their emotional quotient by [allowing them to] empathis[e] with the events’ ⁵⁸ giving the infrastructure emotional resonance. Indeed, ‘much of the symbolic importance of these places stems from their emotional associations, the feelings they inspire of awe, dread, worry, [or] loss’. ⁵⁹

In recent years, due to the improvement of cross-strait ties, the tunnel finds itself hosting the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival, aiming to foster peaceful reconciliation between China and Taiwan. Conceived by Taiwanese cellist Chang Cheng-Jieh and organised by the Kinmen National Park, the Music Festival has been an instant hit since its inception in 2009 to coincide with the 60th Anniversary of the Kuningtou Battle. ⁶⁰ The music performance features renowned Taiwanese musicians playing on a floating platform in the water passage in the tunnel (Figure 6). Audiences are stood along the originally elevated granite corridor, which overlooks the passage. Chang suggested music has instilled life into Zhaishan Tunnel:

I have always thought if it is merely Zhaishan Tunnel, it is only something that is left behind by the war . . . by history. The feeling is unique when you enter, but it does not possess a new life. But with music inside, when the music flows and notes start to dance . . . Music, I think is an excellent language . . . Today, when you enter the Tunnel and the guide talks about what happened 50 or 60 years ago, how this was built because of the war . . . etc . . . This sounds very direct, very hard . . . But if today you enter the Tunnel, and the music comes on . . . The musical notes could almost bring you to a kind of . . . to another world. But that world differs from each and every person. Moreover, I think that music is the best bridge of communication between different generations. It is in fact, a language between our world and the other world . . . The force to move you is even stronger.

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Figure 6.

Zhaishan Tunnel Music Festival: Kinmen Harmony 2010.

Music is not only more powerful than words; it is also full of energy and breathes new life into the tunnel. The tunnel performs the music through its materiality or in Gibson’s ⁶¹ terms affords the performances to take place. The materiality of the tunnel provides perfect acoustics. Conversely, the music acts as the tunnel’s voice and softens its concreteness while affording the audiences the space for imaginations. One audience member wrote on a feedback form, ‘Grateful, thankful, touched’ while another expressed, ‘Bravo! Really touching, fantastic sound effect!’. ⁶² One of the attendees even posted a poem on her or his Facebook page:

For Warriors Who Gave Their Lives

The violin’s elegant notes praise your ultimate sacrifice for this land;

The cello’s muffled sound conveys our admiration for you;

We no longer hear the roaring engines of fighter planes;

. . . Nor we see the battling warships;

We no longer feel the rumbling of the cannons

But I hear it. I hear the flute playing, through the holes left behind by gunpowder blasts;

And I see it. The ensemble of violin and cello interweaves and mirrors

the battle scenes you were in;

And As I close my eyes, I feel the comfort you felt when you closed yours then . . . . ⁶³

The combination of unyielding materials and music enhance the affective potency of the site. ⁶⁴ However, this is not to say that the audiences are directed to a particular ‘ending’, but, as what Chang suggested, the ‘other world’ to which the music brings is different for everyone. This is what Feld ⁶⁵ calls an ‘acoustemology’ of the local combinations of acoustics, knowledge and imagination. The following paragraph from Chris Tilley ⁶⁶ beautifully captures the essence of the reciprocity of place and performance:

Merleau-Ponty, in his famous essay ‘Eye and Mind’, writes of a reversal of roles between the painter and the painted. He cites the painter as saying: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 167). There comes a point, Merleau-Ponty comments, in which who sees and what is being seen, who paints and what is being painted, is thoroughly ambiguous. And this is because painting is not just an act of pure vision; it establishes bodily contact between the painter, who paints with his or her body, and the painted. Painting is a bodily process linking the two. The painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects.

Similarly, in the case of the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival, the rock plays the music as well. The tunnel acts as a ‘sensorium’ ⁶⁷ where the various actors and actants come together. The music is able to create a sensorial experience to connect the bodies of the musicians and spectators with that of the aural of the tunnel. Unlike conventional war memorials where the sense of sight takes precedence, the musical affects in the tunnel offer a proximal alterative to the visualisation of past woes and present hopes. Indeed, the music travels in and between different ‘worlds’, be it now and then, here and there, us and them and dead and alive. This creates an example of what, after LaBelle, we might call an ‘acoustic politics of space’ where sound becomes a method to engage in, and elaborate upon, contemporary globalised political landscapes. ⁶⁸

It is evident that the materiality of the Zhaishan Tunnel is active in (re)creating social relations, and its affordances offer shifting possibilities. Stone has long been associated with conveying within its materiality the thickness of time; ⁶⁹ however, here, the qualities of the rock are more fluid. Drawing on Macdonald’s point about ‘sacred landscapes’ being ‘profaned’ by ordinary uses and thus ‘depleted of their agency to attract and to shape identities in the ways that their original creators would have wished’, ⁷⁰ the nationalist ideologies attributed to the Zhaishan Tunnel end up playing second fiddle to its role in promoting cross-strait relations. Nevertheless, such ‘profanation’ brings with it possibilities in that it allows people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to ‘face up to’ their past ⁷¹ and through the materiality of the tunnel conjure up new possibilities of cross-strait interaction. As such, music in a battlefield tunnel might not be merely something to remind people of the battlefield past but also seeks to transcend political boundaries in its attempt to create new collective memories in the name of peace and harmony for participants of different political allegiances. As such,

[m]emory is constantly refigured in practice and performance through what individuals do. As things are done, other ‘events’ are remembered and re-placed into the present. Memory is temporalized and can reinvigorate what one is doing ‘now’; it is also reinvigorated and can be rerouted in the ‘now’, but not in an exact rerun of the past. ⁷²

Indeed, it is at the intersections of remembering, forgetting and creating memories that both the music and tunnel live. As much as the tunnel still exudes the patriotism and fervour of a past era for some, it has also lent its own material conditions to transmitting the music of peace.

In short, this case study can be positioned at the cross-road of ‘acoustical and cultural analysis’ ⁷³ as it ‘involves both an account of the physical or material conditions of sound production and the social and historical conditions of its invocation and interpretation’. ⁷⁴ Materiality, as Sofaer argues, ‘provides the means by which social relations are visualized . . . Without material expression social expressions have little substantive reality, as there is nothing through which these relations can be mediated’. ⁷⁵ However, the music festival demonstrates a possibility to go beyond ocular-centric analyses and engage in sensuous materialism to gain a more nuanced understanding of the complex interactions between objects and people. Music, although intangible, conveys powerful feelings and is actively re-creating collective memories in the military tunnel. Yet, it does not act alone. It appears as part of the concrete materiality of the tunnel for it is the acoustics of the gneissian structure that allows the music to be what it is. If history is set in stone, then that rock is no ‘compliant conveyor of factuality’ rather it is a ‘keen and affective provocation to thought’ where ‘stone is fact-laden and emotion-triggering . . . Stone is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a thing that makes demands, scripts stories, and does not fully yield to human enframing’. ⁷⁶

Conclusion

This article has sought to destabilise the boundaries of touristic things that are often dismissed as inauthentic, kitsch or banal, and landscapes of heritage and memory are often seen as solemn and sacred. Through ideas of sensuous materialism, this article attempts to go beyond ocular-centric analyses and re-orientate studies on post-war material culture to recognise the interactivity of objects and humans through an enriched attention to the sensuality of heritage. By way of conclusion, we make four reflections on the materiality, memory, identity and mobility of things.

First, work on memorialisation has tended to look at the visual representation and iconography of the past. A notable exception is the tactility of the portable objects in Nicholas Saunders’ Trench Art. We have attempted to go beyond ocular-centric accounts by capturing the sensate and sensorial aspects of human–thing interactions. Hetherington’s ⁷⁷ discussion on touch as a source of knowledge that is ‘proximal’ rather than ‘distal’ invites us to think through how different knowledges emerge from other senses. The Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival has suggested that the specific local combinations of sound, materiality of place and imagination can form a particular sensorium, ⁷⁸ an arena within which the sensory apparatus of an individual operates in culturally specific ways.

Second, we have suggested that things act as objects of memory through the affects they are capable of transmitting or communicating. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s ⁷⁹ notion of psychic energies suggests the potential of things such as the Kinmen Knife and the Zhaishan Tunnel to not only evoke memories of the past but also break and remake collective memories. The affective communication between people and things is crucial to understanding Kinmen’s post-war society and how cross-strait ties might develop.

Third, touristic things are for sure extensions of their makers’ identities but they also possess identities and are involved in active conversations with their buyer or owner or giver. As Tilley ⁸⁰ argues,

Things and places are active agents of identity rather than pale reflections of pre-existing ideas and socio-political relations. Having real material and ideological effects on persons and social relations, things and places can then be regarded as much subjects as objects of identity.

This active dialogue is sustained in places and through the materialities of things and their affordances. What Karen Barad calls ‘a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity’. ⁸¹ Therefore, it is worthwhile to interrogate and capture materiality in action and appreciate how meanings are always in a state or flux of emergence rather than fixed and inscribed forever by the state or social scientists.

The fourth and final point concerns the attempt to recognise multiple spatialities or temporalities by moving away from notions of authenticity tied to location or origin or producer or time period that works on military or tourist souvenirs currently use. For instance, if we privilege metal Trench Art produced by soldiers and civilians during and in the immediate aftermath of war, we overlook the creativity and vitality of more contemporary producers. More specifically, the artillery shell Kinmen Knife and Zhaishan Tunnel examples show that things from the military past often re-invent their materialities over time enabling new political resonances. Just as the Knife transforms itself from a local survival product to a commercial ambassador of peaceful cross-strait ties, the Tunnel’s adamantine materiality ceases to be defensive and instead echoes rhythms of harmony across the Taiwan Strait. Furthermore, things move. The mobility and circulation of material culture has been highlighted. For one, rapprochement tourism between China and Taiwan does not merely consist of travelling bodies; touristic things travel across political boundaries too. Reflecting on the buying of the Kinmen Knife by Chinese tourists, the maker saw it as a way of ‘returning’ the artillery shells to the place from where they were fired not as a counter bombardment but with the reincarnated shell delivering a message of peace and reconciliation. Metal mutates, and yet, it bears still its prior purpose.

To close, looking at the materialities that go into creating the meanings of rapprochement tourism between China and Taiwan suggests that we need to attend more generally to the traffic between memories, meanings and things. Sensuous materialism offers an avenue for us to gain a sense of the past and a ‘sense-able’ present. With a thriving battlefield tourism food industry that has already seen the likes of the ‘Kinmen Battlefield Cocktail series’, the ‘Bullet Crackers’ and the ‘Mine Cakes’ being produced and receiving rave support from cross-strait tourists, ⁸² there is good potential for a sensuous scholarship to be extended to the realm of foodscapes, transient materials and ‘ingested’ memories. Finally, while it is tempting to cast objects as the props that support and stabilise memory, we should note that ‘the relation between remembrance and forgetfulness is not a linear process but a struggle, a tension’. ⁸³ One reason for that tension is that the materials are lively, with their own temporalities and potentialities. In choosing the knife and the tunnel, we have focused on two materials normally associated with inertness and stability. We have tried to show how the matter here becomes active through their materialisation. Therefore, our understandings of memorialisation need to endow the material world with a greater measure of agency in the workings of memory.