Chen Chieh-Jen made Factory in 2003 after meeting former workers from Taiwan’s Lien Fu garment factory, which had closed in 1996 without paying workers compensation and pension claims. The women had spent years protesting. Chen invited them back into the abandoned workplace and filmed them quietly performing the labour they once carried out there.
The resulting work is deliberately slow and silent. Images of the women inside the empty factory are combined with archival propaganda footage presenting Taiwan’s earlier manufacturing prosperity. That collision interests me because nothing needs to be explained through dramatic narration. The same industrial history looks completely different depending on whether it is told through economic success or through the bodies left behind when production moves elsewhere.
Re-enacting work inside a factory that no longer employs anyone turns labour into something almost ghostlike. The machines, gestures and building still remember a system that has already abandoned them. Silence does not make the political argument weaker. It gives the workers’ presence more weight.