Ching Jan Lee and Shu Lea Cheang, Taiwan: the generation after martial law1990, video, color, sound, 58 minutes.
IN THE YEARS After Taiwan’s thirty-eight-year martial law was lifted in 1987, the republic experienced a profound transformation in political, social, and cultural life. At the time, the crises in Taiwan were multiple: a National Assembly that refused to withdraw; a trade deal with the US government that has despaired local farmers; a groundwater so toxic it could be lit with a match; and a housing market destabilized by soaring house prices. State television, meanwhile, hid public grievances.
Taiwan: the generation after martial law, 1990—a fifty-eight minute program of protest footage compiled by Ching Jan Lee and produced by filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang—provides a corrective to official narratives. First broadcast by Deep Dish TV, the popular satellite network launched in 1986 in New York (self-proclaimed as “public access, fearless television”), and featuring entries shot by the Green Team collective, Chih Yu Hung, Chao Chiang Tang, and the United Homeless Association, The generation after martial law chronicles an inventive repertoire of protests, spanning street actions, sleepovers, even mock funerals commemorating the “death of the news.” In an unforgettable scene, activists throw dozens of television sets against the gates of a Taiwanese television station, which was fortified by a line of riot police. (Later, the scrolling text describes how, during the 1989 election, Team Green set up a low-powered pirate TV channel to provide alternative coverage of Taiwan’s main opposition party.)
The generation after martial law is one of five one-hour programs produced across Asia by Cheang. Revisited more than thirty years later, the series is a powerful document of the sites elsewhere of the global Cold War, where a latticework of new tensions emerges that foreshadows the next century. Shot on consumer camcorders and distributed through ad hoc circuits, these programs are stark evidence of citizens fighting to record – and broadcast – their own history.
Tiffany Sia is a New York-based artist, filmmaker and writer.
