The Buffalo That Couldn't Be Translated

Jul 12
3 min read

The year was 1930. Huang Tu-shui, thirty-five years old, was working on a plaster relief two and a half meters high and five and a half meters wide: five water buffaloes, three bare herder boys, banana leaves opening overhead. He had a pain in his side, but that seemed the smaller thing compared to the relief before him, which he meant to send to Japan's Imperial Art Exhibition, where he had already made history four times. The pain turned out to be appendicitis, the appendicitis became peritonitis, and the relief became his final work; he died at the end of that year.

But the work began its second life: a century of being renamed.

Huang Tu-shui, 南國 (also known as 水牛群像 / Water Buffaloes), plaster relief, 1930. 250 × 555 cm. Zhongshan Hall, Taipei. The sculptor's final work, completed in the year of his death.

Seven years after his death, his widow Liao Chiu-kuei (廖秋桂) gave the plaster to the city of Taipei. It was cut into sections, shipped from Japan to Taiwan, and set into the wall between the second and third floors of the public auditorium, where it remains today. Generations have climbed past it on their way to concerts and ceremonies. In 2009 it became a National Treasure, the first twentieth-century work admitted to a register previously occupied by much older things. It is the island's most beloved artwork.

But it is also a work without a settled name. The hall that keeps the original labels it 南國 — South Country — "also known as" 水牛群像, the herd of water buffaloes. But an island does not call itself "the south"; a capital does. 南國 means Taiwan was seen from Japan, a warm district on an imperial map, the way a Parisian salon once saw Tahiti. At the Tokyo Fine Arts School, Huang had mastered the Western academic figure, a tradition the empire itself had only just imported. He could have spent that training on the salon's subjects. He spent it on home: a farm's midday, modeled in plaster at the scale of a wall. His boys are no Belvedere Apollos. They are thin, sun-browned, naked but for the farmer's conical hat, at ease among animals the way only children who work with animals are. The work has the cool sheen of its material, but what visitors feel is heat: humidity under banana leaves, sun on bare shoulders.

Huang Tu-shui (1895–1930). Courtesy National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Cross into English and the verdicts multiply. The city's cultural office calls the relief Water Buffalo: singular, generic, a caption for a photograph. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which keeps a bronze cast, says Water Buffaloes, restoring the herd. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, keeper of the other cast, chooses Taiwan Buffalo, no longer an animal but a living being that belonged somewhere.

None of them is wrong. That is exactly what makes the choice interesting, because a title is a verdict: what a work depicts, who it addresses, what it is allowed to remember. I favor "Formosa" — Formosa Buffalo, a title no museum has tried.

Every Taiwanese schoolchild is taught where the island's other name came from: Portuguese sailors passing in the sixteenth century, crying Ilha Formosa, beautiful island. Historians now doubt the sailors ever said it of this island; the earliest record that clearly attaches the name to Taiwan is a Spanish ship's log of 1584, and it was the Dutch, decades later, who fixed it to the map. Even the island's most beautiful name is a translation with an unsettled provenance. Formosa belongs to no state and appears on no current passport; it is the island as feeling rather than administration, the shared memory rather than the map. It would keep both the herd and the belonging while letting the borders fall away.

And by the way, the strongest titles are never neutral.