Chen Chieh Jen’s movies
Lingchi – Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002)
The concept for Lingchi – Echoes of a Historical Photograph comes from a photograph of lingchi torture taken in China by a French soldier in 1904 or 1905.
Historically, there were three victims of lingchi torture who were photographed by different French soldiers. Their images not only served as testimony to savage barbarism in China, but were also made into postcards in Europe and widely circulated among novelty hunters drawn by their foreign, exotic appeal. In his 1961 book Les Larmes d’Éros, Georges Bataille discussed lingchi from a philosophical perspective, making it a widely recognized image among western intellectuals. Also, Bataille’s concern with ecstasy and limit experience made these concepts the most widely cited in discussions about lingchi in the West.
With Linchi, Chen Chieh-jen extends his discussion of the history of photographed, which is concealed within the history of photography and is still unwritten. This video also references Bataille’s perspectives on ecstasy in eros to discuss the victim situated within a state of limit experience. Furthermore, Chen uses video technology to enter the body of the torture victim through two large wounds in his chest, where he shows us lingchi-like imagery from the modern history of China and Taiwan. Peering out from these wounds, the camera records portraits of historical western photographers and unemployed laborers in contemporary Taiwan. By way of these successive scenes, the victim’s body becomes a conduit linking the present to the past and serves as a metaphor for the invisible lingchi still present in processes of modernization of the non-western world.
Chen believes the victim’s enigmatic smile as he gazes toward the horizon in the historical photograph not only reflects a state of ecstasy induced by opium, but more importantly creates confusion in viewers that begs for an explanation. As the victim endures lingchi, and is completely powerless to take any action or escape, he exhibits a subtle smile which he is able to preserve with the camera in the colonizing soldier’s hand. His smile becomes an act of dynamic defiance through the confusion it generates, and an image that continues to engage viewers in dialog long after the victim’s death. In this way, his smile is an action that cannot be erased by death or time.
Using props, hairstyles and costumes that reflect different eras, as well as performances by unemployed workers and actors from small theater groups, the video Lingchi presents the continuing relationship between lingchi imagery and contemporary society.
The Route (2006)
Made for the 2006 Liverpool Biennial, Chen Chieh-jen’s video The Route is based on the historic Neptune Jade incident and the global worker’s movement. For the video, Chen invited Kaohsiung longshoremen to perform a simulated strike.
The Neptune Jade incident was a global response in support of longshoremen who were protesting port privatization in Liverpool, England. Longshoremen at ports around the world protested by refusing to unload the cargo ship the Neptune Jade, a symbol of capitalist profits. The ship traveled to Oakland, California; Vancouver, Canada; and Yokohama and Kobe both in Japan seeking to unload, but was denied at each of these ports. Unwilling to lose any more money, investors finally sent the Neptune Jade to Kaohsiung, Taiwan where the ship and its entire contents were auctioned off.
At the time, Kaohsiung longshoremen were facing similar difficulties, and due to their lack of contact with the global workers movement, were unaware of the circumstances surrounding the Neptune Jade. Likewise, most longshoremen in Liverpool were unaware of ship’s final disposition in Kaohsiung. Using his artistic imagination, Chen Chieh-jen filmed this simulated strike with the actual participation of the Kaohsiung longshoremen, and then created a dialog with Liverpool residents by projecting the video at the Liverpool Biennial.
Chen Chieh-jen’s simulated strike responds to neoliberalism promoted by national governments’ alliances with capitalism, and suggests a course of political action for the future. Chen was also concerned with extending the outcome of the historic Neptune Jade incident beyond its actual conclusion and highlighting its inspirational value using a new art form. In this way, the incident does not simply become something of the past just because of its conclusion, but rather a new version of the story is created through art, making the incident’s significance a part of our collective experience and narrative.
Military Court and Prison (2007-08)
Made for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Spain, Chen Chieh-Jen’s video Military Court and Prison explores the transformation of the Jingmei Detention Center, which stood across from the artist’s childhood home, into a human rights memorial. During Taiwan’s Martial Law period during the Cold War, the Kuomintang (KMT) Government used this detention center to stage national violence, trials and to incarcerate political prisoners. In 2004, almost two decades after the end of martial law, the then ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) set into motion plans to transform the center, and on December 10, 2007, the new Taiwan Human Rights Memorial was officially opened to the public.
Because numerous files and documentation on the White Terror in Taiwan were either purposely destroyed in 1987 when martial law was lifted and others continue to be sealed away in the National Archives, and neither the KMT nor DPP have taken steps to make this period of Taiwanese history public and fully transparent, the memorial has incited controversy regarding transitional justice and human rights since its opening in 2007.
Chen Chieh-jen started filming his video Military Court and Prison two months before the opening ceremony of the Taiwan Human Rights Memorial, and finished filming in four months.In addition to the long-term imprisonment and brutal oppression of political dissidents, Chen maintains capitalist and national mechanisms during the Cold War/Martial Law period stifled the thinking of the Taiwanese people in a variety of ways. Programmatic disciplinary strategies with the precision of psychosurgery effectively cut off the possibility for people to build dialogues with dissident groups and gradually diminished the people’s powers of discrimination. Furthermore, throughout the development of capitalism and the government’s deployment of each new administrative technology, the people became, in turn, conspirators in the Cold War/Martial Law mechanism, anti-communist freedom fighters, low-paid factory laborers, obedient workers, consumers driven by nothing but blind consumerist desire, and supporters of neoliberalism and the counter-terrorism coalition; which all continue to breed a consciousness of domestication and docility.
In contrast to academic research that considers white terror a historical period, Chen Chieh-jen raises a new question about the state of contemporary Taiwan society. Through his work, Chen suggests that perhaps the mechanisms in contemporary society have continued to create new forms of ideological prisons. And perhaps, in a fashion similar to the White Terror, these mechanisms have created a new form of “Martial Law” that has become internalized and embedded into the very fabric of society itself.
The fictional narrative Chen presents in Military Court and Prison follows a forgotten political prisoner who comes upon present-day foreign laborers, unemployed factory workers, vagrants and others in the old detention center which is about to become a human rights memorial. In this space suffused with martial law history and strewn with legal documents, the characters work together to push a large metal structure resembling temporary worker housing, loudly scraping the floor and banging in the process. After a short interval, the court and prison falls silent, indicating their allegorical performance has come to its end. The laborers, workers and vagrants once again assume their true identities, and begin to write their names and stories of alienation under the government’s administrative mechanisms in blank areas on a newspaper’s business section and outside the writing spaces on official government forms. Through this act of writing, Chen Chieh-jen indirectly chronicles the history of prisons without walls which have persisted in contemporary society even after the end of martial law.
Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprises, Inc. (2010)
After the Korean War erupted in 1950, the United States, which had discontinued support for Kuomintang forces in the final stages of the Chinese Civil War, dispatched the Seventh Fleet to blockade the Taiwan Strait and maintain U.S. hegemony in the Pacific region. Also, to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from deploying PLA forces to the Korean battlefield, the CIA reestablished cooperation with the Kuomintang Government, which was now based in Taiwan following their retreat from the Mainland. One cooperative venture between the CIA and Kuomintang was a non-governmental trade organization designated as Western Enterprises, which started the Anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) to launch a surprise attack on China. NSA forces were composed of low-level officers and soldiers who were mostly young men from poor farming and fishing families in China. Chen Chieh-jen’s father, who was one of these men from China, served as an NSA soldier at the time.
The CIA called their Taiwan program Western Enterprises from 1951 to 1955, and then continued to operate under the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty from 1954 to 1979. While the name Western Enterprises was only used for a short time, it was full of symbolic meaning, as it portended U.S. policies that would discipline and administer Taiwan for years to come. These policies took the form of support for the Kuomintang dictatorship, whose anticommunist, marshal law mechanisms completely suppressed leftist factions and political dissidents in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987. Furthermore, through the U.S.-guided Treaty of San Francisco (1951), the sovereignty of Taiwan was left undecided, resulting in its status as a state of exception. Again, under the U.S. policies of military and economic assistance from 1951 to 1965, Taiwan was reorganized into a logistics base for the U.S. military and a manufacturing zone in the international capitalist system of divided labor. Following the brainwashing by Kuomintang anti-Communist education and U.S. Cold War cultural propaganda, Taiwan became a pro-U.S., anti-Communist base, and a capitalist society.
Following China’s 1978 economic reforms, the United States formally acknowledged the PRC’s sovereignty over China in 1979. At the same time, the United States Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, breaking off diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan) thus again rendering it a state of exception, much like a territorial possession of the U.S. In 1987, following the end of the Cold War, pressure on Taiwan to fully liberalize and open its markets to the U.S., and continual protests calling for democracy in Taiwan, the Kuomintang put an end to thirty eight years of marshal law. Following the U.S. led founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995, Taiwan, which had already been subject to discipline, administration and domination for so long, became a subordinate region in the system of globalized neoliberal capitalism. The local history and social context of Taiwan was erased, eviscerating its society, as well as its memories and historical records.
Artwork Introduction
When Chen Chieh-jen’s father passed away in 2006, he left behind a partially fictionalized autobiography, a paper listing NSA soldiers lost at sea in a raid on the Mainland when their ship was sank by the PLA, an empty photo album and an old military uniform.
Chen once wrote in an artist statement:
My father was always very serious and uncommunicative; it seems like he never talked about his life. He once told my brother that those NSA soldiers lost at sea were the children of poor farmers and fishermen just like he was, and joining the army was their only option in the chaotic war years. My father also said that the autobiography was only a report written for the authorities to demonstrate his party loyalty, and therefore wasn’t real. The pictures that were in the photo album had been burned by my father.
When I was a child I once peeked at that photo album. I remember seeing a lot of pictures of my father with NSA soldiers being trained by Western Enterprises.
I don’t know why my father burned those photographs, or why he left behind a fake autobiography and that ragged list of dead soldiers’ names. Neither am I sure if he knew that there was a brutal crackdown on leftists and dissidents in Taiwan at the same time of the NSA attack on China. I also wonder how he, as a child from a poor Mainland fishing village who later became a defender of a rightist dictatorship and soldier in the capitalist camp, felt about the Cold War, anti-Communism, and marshal law, or even post-marshal-law neoliberalism.
Like so many other fathers of the time, mine chose to remain silent about his life experiences. While I understand the strict monitoring during marshal law and my father’s need to cling to life under the Kuomintang’s system, I don’t know why he chose and maintained silence. The silence of these fathers has left countless black holes in our history and minds, making Taiwanese society one that cannot narrate its own historical context.
In Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprises, Inc., Chen Chieh-jen uses a poetic dialectic to transform the building that housed Western Enterprises—a place full of imperialistic overtones—into a symbolic labyrinth embodying fifty years of post-war Taiwanese history, and a wasteland reflecting the amnesia of the Taiwanese people.
In the video, the son reexamines items left behind by his father: an empty photo album which cannot testify to history, a real but impossible to verify list of NSA soldiers lost at sea, a partially fictionalized autobiography written as self examination, and an old military uniform. The son marks the anniversary of his father’s death by burning spirit money and then putting on the uniform amidst the drifting and curling smoke—unifying his image with that of his father’s—to make a journey back to Western Enterprises.
The son, now portraying the father, wanders through different areas of the abandoned Western Enterprises facility which is permeated with traces of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). On different floors of the building he meets an NSA soldier unsuccessfully searching for his own military dossier, an undocumented victim of white terror who cannot leave the building, and unemployed laborers and day workers trapped by abandoned industrial equipment. These people and ghosts rejected by historical views promulgated by imperial and state apparatuses next help one another to the MAAG auditorium in the Western Enterprises building. Here they assemble on the stage forming a monument to the memory of the people, which stands in resistance to dominant historical views.
Through the production of his art action Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprises, Inc. after the once historical Western Enterprises came to embody the face of contemporary neoliberalism, Chen Chieh-jen counters extant dominant historical views with the processes of re-imagining, rewriting and revising history, and further unfolds the political activities of rewriting and re-imagining among the people of Taiwan