Making a Transnational Design History in East Asia: Yen Shuilong’s Craft-Design Movement

Yen Shuilong (1903-97) was born in Taiwan within the ‘Japanese Empire’ but his live is dominated by what we would now call transnational activities. During the fifteen years since his death, there have been a number of retrospective exhibitions on him, and these have served to anchor his status in Taiwanese history of art and design. From last year through to this year the Taipei Fine Arts Museum organised an exhibition ‘The Public Spirit, Beauty in the Making： Shui-Long Yen’. (Fig. 2) On the other hand in Japan, even though Yen was Japanese until 1945, he hasn’t been well recognized, and it appears as though he may have been intentionally forgotten with the history of Japanese colonization.