This dissertation addresses the multifaceted aspects of cultural identity as expressed in modern Taiwanese paintings during the Japanese colonial era, from 1895 to 1945. Under Japanese rule, Taiwan was united for the first time by a single official language and a standardized Western-influenced education system. In those circumstances, Taiwan underwent fast-paced modernization that gave rise to challenging new cultural forms and ideologies, and provided space for the gradual development of a new sense of personal and cultural identity.

The present study reveals that rather than manifesting a uniform cultural identity or ideological orientation, Western-style paintings of the period demonstrate ambiguity and hybridity, with oscillation between Chinese, Japanese and Western outlooks and signs of an emergent Taiwanese consciousness characterized by a cosmopolitan spirit rooted in love for the land.

Chapter One outlines Taiwan's history and Sino-centric cultural development before the Japanese colonial era. Chapter Two discusses the difficulties confronting aspiring Taiwanese artists during Japanese rule and examines popular new themes, such as the artist's studio, the self-portrait and the family portrait, which shed light on the fluid construction of new cultural identities. Chapter Three examines artworks and writings by leading expatriate Japanese painters and commentators touching on the question of Taiwan's cultural distinctiveness. Chapter Four addresses the emergence among the Taiwanese of an ever-maturing consciousness of Taiwan and themselves as a distinctive, integral whole in relation to the colonial mother country, the ancestral motherland and the world.

Taiwanese painters of the Japanese colonial period both mirrored and contributed to trends in the evolution of the island's cultural identity. Through a careful analysis of form and content, this dissertation concludes that while the paintings are less pointed and discursively revealing than were contemporaneous Taiwanese literary works, they provide invaluable testimony to the multivalent complexity of the period's cross-cultural dynamics and to the individual artists' search for a vision of Taiwan, Taiwanese-ness, and a broader humanity that lies beyond.