NOBODY’S PAWN | WE ARE…
不是誰的棋子｜我們是…

Matsu in the World’s Crosscurrents

Global politics are too often reduced to great power rivalry, framing the world as a chessboard where smaller places are mere pawns. Matsu knows this reality well. At the intersection of international tensions, it is often cast as “Taiwan’s outlying islands” or “a frontline against China”, frames that erase the lived experiences, agency, and aspirations of its people. This erasure is not only political but cultural, reducing Matsu’s diverse identities to a single narrative of vulnerability and dependence.

In news reports, Matsu appears as a strategic outpost; in tourism brochures, a remote curiosity. Such portrayals overlook the islands’ own rhythms: stone houses holding the memories of generations; the seasonal gathering of native plants; fishing skills passed hand to hand. Someone once described the Matsu spirit to me as 獨立生活，獨立思考，獨立創作 (independent living, independent thinking, independent creating); I felt that beautiful independence across its islands. This energy is not the backdrop to a “frontline,” but the heartbeat of Matsu.

Since 1992—five years after Taiwan’s main island—Matsu emerged from martial law. Its people debated what comes next: tourism, reviving the fishing industry, casinos, even nuclear waste storage. Each path reflects the will to endure and the desire for a self-defined future. Between labels imposed from outside and choices wrestled with inside, Matsu continues to ask: how do we live, create, and think on our own terms? And in the space between competing powers, how do we chart a course wholly our own?

Layers of History and Identity

Matsu’s independent spirit is rooted in a complex history. Even today, geography and scale still create deep inequalities: higher costs, fewer choices, longer waits, and harder-to-sustain services. Limited revenue, demographic decline, and underinvestment mean many basic needs are harder to meet here—turning everyday access to healthcare, education, and infrastructure into persistent struggles.

Here, identity can hold all three: Matsuese in spirit, Taiwanese in politics, Eastern Min in culture. Yet as Cross-Strait tensions sharpen and polarization deepens, such layered belonging has become harer to sustain, compressed by dominant narratives.

Taiwan has begun reckoning with its historical traumas, yet too often the process is politicized into binaries. Matsu knows life is never that simple. The deeper question: how do we understand one another’s pain and learn from it, to shape a future where it does not repeat?

For generations, the Matsuese have lived with rupture—separated from loved ones, sacrificing local development for national security, leaving home to survive. Told honestly, it is not only a story of proud sacrifice but also of structural dependence. The question now is how might Matsu break from this logic and chart its own path: one of dignity, imagination, and collective care.

Transforming the Story

Nobody’s Pawn | We Are… challenges black-and-white ways of dividing the world: China vs Taiwan, Communist vs capitalist, right vs wrong. It asks how Matsu’s history of isolation and extraction can be transformed into a future rooted in place, connection, and agency. 

The process spanned multiple islands, weaving listening, dialogue, and co-creation. At gatherings in Nangan and Beigan (hosted by the Matsu Youth Development Association) and in Dongyin (hosted by Salty Island Studio) and Juguang (hosted by Dapu Plus+) invite the people of Matsu joined as co-creators to reflect on two questions: What has shaped the spirit of Matsu? How can we carry forward this spirit into the future we deserve?

Participants respond with their memories and aspirations, inscribed on black-and-white chess pieces—one side capturing Matsu’s spirit, the other channeling it into a slogan for Matsu’s future. In a place long been inundated with slogans from above, this is a chance to reclaim the slogan itself—turning it into an expression defined by Matsu, for Matsu. Each chess piece is also a vase, filled with the islands’ flora and fauna. This offers a quiet but radical inversion: even if others have seen us as pawns, we are, in truth, beautiful vessels of life.

After the exhibition, co-creators take their vase home, each holding a piece of Matsu’s story and its future. As visitors walk among these works and take in their stories, they may see a different Matsu: one living, creating, and dreaming on its own terms.