The “ILHA Formosa: the Emergence of Taiwan on the World Scene in the 17(superscript th) Century” is a special exhibition of National Palace Museum in 2003. This article examines the exhibition through multiple perspectives such as politics of exhibition, narrative of history, nation-building and symbolic economy. Exhibitions and museums are regimes of truth that shaping historical representation, and fields for power regulation-performance embodied in special technologies of display and ways of seeing. Firstly, the authors analyses the objects, display plan, discourses of the “Formosa” exhibition, and organizational apparatus for the preparation process, showing the politics of exhibition. Secondly, we focus on discussing how the display was related to the historical narratives about Taiwan's subjectivity and nation-building engineering, pointing to the normative and ideological functions of museums and displays as apparatuses for culture governance. However, museum displays are also the locus of symbolic economy, and follow the logics of profit and market which reveal in media promotion, publicity, and gift shop selling. In sum, this article hopes to reveal the multiple and contradictory characters of contemporary Taiwan through analyzing this attempt for reflexively (re)positioning Taiwan.