Dreaming Muscular Prowess through Falling

Censorship, puppets and mimicry

Taking po-te-hi as a case study, I examine how anti-censorship strategies have been transformed into a popular cultural discourse in hand puppetry.

From acts of unintentional slippage to conscious cross-cultural and high-tech performatives, mimicry in the case of po-te-hi has operated on linguistic as well as ideological planes to become a collective process that documents Taiwan’s (post)colonial condition.