Title: 1980
Year: 2021
Medium: photography and writing | digital photograph and text
Dimension: variable/ 314 words
Location: Shih Chiu Chia Industrial Zone, Taichung, Taiwan
I was born in 1980 in Taichung, Taiwan. As a child who went to classes for calligraphy and the Apple DOS operating system, I was part of the generation that would forever jump between traditional values and innovations. I was 7 years old on the day they announced that martial law was lifted in Taiwan. I remember I was singing the national anthem and saluting the Taiwanese flag. I had a tear in my eye, but I didn’t know why I was crying. I was born in a generation in between new and old, in between freedom and suppression.
Although the name Chiang Kai-Shek doesn’t mean that much to me, globalization and China’s effects on the global supply have a direct impact on my family. My father had a small bonded leather factory in my hometown. Just as the label “Made in Taiwan” found glory on bicycles and umbrellas, the manufacturing business was booming in Taiwan during the ’80s. Under the pressure of larger land and cheaper labor in China, many Taiwanese manufacturing businesses had moved to China in the 1980s and 1990s to expand their production because of its unbeatable rates. My father stayed instead for my family, and inevitably, we underwent the chronic decline of the manufacturing industry during the 1990s and early 2000s. This was the so-called Sunset Industry in Taiwan.
Production continued to shrink little by little and day by day. In 2012, a devastating midnight fire in my father’s factory eventually brought him to the decision to retire. That factory played an important role in his and our family’s lives and history.
Growing up in this transitional background might have drawn my interests to found objects, post-industrial settings, and industrial goods, where I find associations of traces of my family business and personal history. My lifelong Manufracture Series aims to investigate and bridge the relationship between artmaking and manufacturing.
Cover Image: Manufracture Series–The End, 2015, digital print, dimensions variable. Image taken by my father from his low-resolution cell phone camera.
