Scene: an abandoned space. On the wall is a clock stopped at 11:55, five minutes before martial law is to be lifted.

Main characters: forgotten political prisoners. Heavy footsteps wander between the old, dusty courthouse and jail that are to be torn down. The prisoners and out-of-work laborers, immigrants, mainland brides and wanderers meet. Together they push a metal structure across the floor, making a piercing, scraping sound.

This is Military Court and Prison, a new piece by Chen commissioned by Spain's Museo Reina Sofia for 60,000 (approximately NT$2.85 million). Taiwanese have not yet had the opportunity to see the work, which went on display in the Museo Reina Sofia in March of this year. Picasso's Guernica, which depicts the Nazi bombing of a small Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War, is the museum's prized possession: the painting depicts the mortally wounded bodies of a horse, a bull, and six people with amputated limbs, faces contorted in pain. Picasso used the language of Cubism to depict the horrors of war and create a deeply meaningful work. As the holder of this piece, the Museo Reina Sofia occupies an important position in the world of contemporary art. Chen Chieh-jen is the first Taiwanese artist to be invited to exhibit at this important museum.

Life by the prison

Military Court and Prison was shot in 35-mm film and is 63 minutes long. The camera makes slow movements, going from far to near, and there is no dialogue. The set is like those of Taiwan's avant-garde small theater troupes. Non-professional actors act out strange behaviors such as pulling out a handful of pens from an old desk and writing on a piece of paper, strolling in circles, or joining together to push a sheet metal structure like those commonly seen in Taiwan's factories, labor sites, or rooftops, symbolizing an environment of visible and invisible shackles and detention. To film his new work, Chen worked for three months in a disused auto repair workshop near the intersection of Taipei's Civic Boulevard and Chienkuo North Road. He created a 1200-square-meter space there, and found sociology students, out-of-work and foreign laborers, and homeless people to participate as actors. Shooting was completed efficiently in just ten days, but the theme had been taking form for over 40 years.

Chen grew up near the military court and prison on Fuhsing Road in Hsintien, which from 2004 was converted into a human rights memorial park that opened in 2007. He was always curious about what the prisoners behind the high walls were thinking, what their lives were like, and what relation they had to him.

"The military prison was part of my life growing up," Chen says. For over 30 years of martial law in Taiwan, the government put into practice a kind of collective thought control, he says. Now, Taiwan has entered a new age of freedom, but immigrants, laborers, and foreign brides are still subject to political and legal controls. To some, this society is still under martial law.

"But I don't want to talk about the past, so I didn't choose the military prison as the location for the shoot," he says. "I wanted to use the military prison as a metaphorical space to show the unseen state of martial law in contemporary Taiwan. How can the dissident voices of different races and classes that exist now be revealed?"

For his Military Court and Prison, Chen turned a disused auto workshop near the intersection of Taipei's Civic Boulevard and Chienkuo North Road into a studio. He filled the empty, dusty space with old filing cabinets, documents, and a large metal structure. In June, before returning the space to its owners, Chen assembled cast and crew there for a photo.

No era for art

The 48-year-old Chen graduated from Fuhsing Vocational School's Arts and Crafts department in 1978. After completing his military service, he spent three years as a cartoonist at Wang Film Productions. "I did it to make a living and have a job," he says. "We worked on projects contracted out from Disney. The results were brought back to Taiwan and marketed here, and weren't products of our own life experiences. I felt I was wasting my life and was depressed, so I couldn't continue."

He began to realize that he wanted to pursue the arts before the lifting of martial law, when performance art arrived on the scene.

In 1983, he performed his Power Loss #3 in Taipei's busy Hsimenting district. He had a group of idle youths cover their eyes with black cloth and shout amid the chaos for half an hour. This was possibly the first time after the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979 that anyone dared to take part in a public group activity. During the performance, police and intelligence agencies arrived on the scene to investigate. It just happened that it came at a politically sensitive time when there was a legislator by-election going on. The intelligence agencies didn't want the extra trouble and thus let them go.

His Cream Ceremony of late 1986 took place over four weeks in four locations-the streets of east Taipei, a small theater, a valley, and the seashore. A group of young people crawled from east Taipei to the Hsinhsiang Theater near the Jen-ai traffic circle, attracting attention from passersby along the way. The performance gradually moved from the heart of the city outward, ending on the coast at Tanshui-the shore being an island's most extreme edge. At the time the coast was still restricted, and the military outpost would not allow them to use cameras to film the event. The strict intervention of the military served as a reminder to them that under martial law there was no such thing as "art for art's sake."

The piece, which seemed confused and disorganized to Chen, was also a source of frustration for him. Not knowing what way or form he could employ to counter these restrictions, he felt a loss of will.

For his Military Court and Prison, Chen turned a disused auto workshop near the intersection of Taipei's Civic Boulevard and Chienkuo North Road into a studio. He filled the empty, dusty space with old filing cabinets, documents, and a large metal structure. In June, before returning the space to its owners, Chen assembled cast and crew there for a photo.

Lost decade

For the long period between 1986 and 1996, Chen lived a hermit-like existence, cut off from the world. He relied on his younger brother, who ran a street stall, to survive.

With no desire to do anything, he would just putter about the house and read aimlessly. Many days, the only words he'd speak at all were when he went out to buy cigarettes: "A pack of Paichangs, please."

"If I had to make three phone calls in a day, it would seem like a lot of work. I would think over and over about it without being able to act," he says. "Spacing out, fantasizing-the days would often just slip by me. There was one year in which I did hardly anything at all. I just realized one day that an entire year had gone by."

In 1996, he felt "it was time," and he could work again. For the next three years, he found horrifying pictures of decapitation and torture from books on the history of Chinese photography and Chinese criminal penalties as well as from Tears of Eros by the French deconstructionist Georges Bataille. He digitally manipulated the images for his series Revolt in the Soul and Body, which explores important issues of images and power, body and punishment, politics and violence, rationality and psychosis, and observing and being observed.

Video terror

The series, which has been categorized as a work of "the aesthetics of terror," played a large part in determining Chen's place in the contemporary Taiwanese art world.

In 1998, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum held its first international biennale, curated by Fumio Nanjo and titled "Desire Site." Thirty-six artists from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and China exhibited paintings, sculpture, video installations, and other multimedia works themed around desire.

Chen, who took part, exhibited scanned and enlarged images of punishments. Audiences stood between two walls with embossed plaques, and could hear whispering voices from all directions. It was the feeling of being in hell. The work expressed the absurdity, senselessness, and cruelty of slaughter in a way that was as hard to bear as it was to ignore.

Chen was also invited to exhibit this work at the biennale in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the years that followed, he became one of a very few Taiwanese artists regularly invited to exhibit in international biennales.

In 2002, he continued with his theme of historical punishments with his work Lingchi-Echoes of a Historical Photograph, developing it into short film of silent cruelty.

He based the work on a photograph taken in 1905 at the end of the Qing dynasty by a French soldier of the punishment lingchi, or "death by a thousand cuts." The camera enters the victim's body through two wounds on his chest. It gazes at history through the victim's body and sees traces of lingchi from the past to the present, in such examples as the Japanese Unit 731 that carried out experiments on Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War, in Taiwan's political prisons, and in heavily polluted factories. The camera also gazes outward from the wounds at the 1905 Western photographer (the spectator) and at contemporary out-of-work laborers.

"Terror is one of the intrinsic qualities of photography," says Chen. Before martial law was lifted in 1987, cruel images from the Rape of Nanjing and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were often displayed in Taiwan's elementary and junior high schools, and images of punishments were impressed on Chen's consciousness from an early age. Some choose to brush aside or forget such images, but he chose to remain true to his life experiences. "That's because what an artist deals with are the issues of society and the times," he says.

Stagnation and mobility

For the 2003 work The Factory, Chen took as his subject unemployed laborers and a long-abandoned factory. He used a semi-documentary style to show the painful history of Taiwan's manufacturing industry in the changing market.

He found two women who had worked for more than 20 years in a Lien Fu textile factory in Taoyuan and returned with them to their worksite. The factory had closed its doors suddenly seven years earlier, and the owners refused to pay retirement or severance pay to its workers. Chen and his team snuck in and filmed the seven years of accumulated dust, stagnant air, and debris such as calendars, newspapers, time clocks, desks, chairs, sewing machines, and fans.

In the film, the workers show the traces of the years gone by on their faces, their trembling hands that threaded needles, and the "emptiness" the factory left in their lives. They make the accusation that after the factory "moved" and abandoned them, the powerless workers were condemned to remain there, wandering aimlessly.

In 2005's Bade Area, the scene is inside a building with a billboard out front advertising an empty commercial space, a familiar sight in many small Taiwanese towns. A few workers wander around in the abandoned factory within, moving obsolete computers back and forth. Over and over, the outlines of their bodies appear in the light and then disappear again into the darkness. Chairs pile up like skeletons until the space is like an abandoned graveyard.

Then, workers climb up onto the overgrown rooftop and wander through dunes of sand. At the bottom is a pool of water, in which pieces of garbage float. It seems that they have long since grown accustomed to it all, and they drink and sing karaoke as they look out over the wasteland. Their lives are like the discarded bottles floating in the waters-they float around on this patch of land, powerless to change their circumstances. They can only go where their environment takes them. They are rootless and without powerful hopes, not to mention dreams.

Chen, who grew up during the period when Taiwan's economy depended on processing and assembly work, says that his sister worked in an electronics factory in Hsintien for 20 years. "I am dealing with an era that has already come to a close, considering the meaning of these life experiences. Though an industry or a factory might come to an end, the people don't disappear. The industry's history may be in the past tense, but the scene and the people are still in the present tense. They can even extend into the future because of their tremendous influence. There are still many people in Taiwan wrapped up in that industrial era who even now cannot escape it."

Video solidarity

In 2006, Chen was invited to the biennale in Liverpool. His The Route, for the Tate Liverpool, deals with a larger, more complex issue-the uphill battle of the labor movement in the face of globalization.

Chen researched the relations between Taiwan and Liverpool online. He found a report of a ship called the Neptune Jade that set sail from Liverpool and was refused entry at ports around the world until it finally ended up in Kaohsiung.

The story began in September, 1995. The British government privatized its ports, and union dockworkers in Liverpool were being replaced with cheap short-term labor. When 20 workers were let go without warning by the Mersey Port Company, the remaining 400 went on strike. In solidarity, longshoremen around the world took to resisting policies of port privatization.

The strike lasted for two years, and the Neptune Jade, which had set sail for Oakland, California, was refused entry in Oakland, Vancouver, Kobe, and Yokohama as workers in ports there refused to unload it out of solidarity. Finally, in October, 1997, it docked at Kaohsiung, and the ship's owners auctioned it and its contents off as one package.

Chen went to Kaohsiung to investigate and discovered that though port workers there had also fought against privatization, they lacked connections with the international labor movement. The workers and the port authority there were completely in the dark about the Neptune Jade.

Chen took the traces of a piece of history and turned them into art, transcending the real outcome with a fictional action and extending the meaning of the strike.

In the 16 minutes of The Route, all is black and white other than the dock's blue warehouse. The camera remains fixed on the longshoremen as they silently pass out placards reading "The world is our picket line," form themselves into a line that passes through the dock's wire fences. Under the sun, beads of sweat roll down their foreheads. Their silence is a form of concentrated power.

"Nobody knew that the end result of this protest happened in Taiwan. When I finished shooting and brought the film to Liverpool, it was symbolic of the way the incident was not over and that culture could keep it alive," Chen says.

Artistic asceticism

Chen creates around one piece a year. It's not much, but each new work generates heated discussion in the specialized world of critics.

However, even though Chen's works are of the currently fashionable film and video installation genres, very few Taiwanese collect such works and his reputation remains stronger than his commercial appeal.

Chen doesn't harbor any complaints about this low level of commercial interest in his work, but he does resent the exploding market for contemporary art of recent years: for decades no one paid any mind to modern Taiwanese art, but only now are things turning around due to "China fever." He says, "It's as if these people are crazy enough to think they can rewrite art history!"

While Chen is not averse to the buying and selling of art, he does see judging the value of art by its price as "perverse." He says that the value of art should be determined by unceasing discussion and critique.

After remaining beneath the radar for years, Chen's works began to be purchased by museums and galleries abroad after 2002 for between 40,000 and 60,000 each. In 2005, Chen signed a five-year representation deal with Main Trend Gallery for NT$1 million per year. His financial situation is finally becoming stable.

"I am amazed that a Taiwanese artist has been able to accomplish works like this! For many years he's lived an ascetic, lonely monk-like lifestyle. Taiwanese society still has some reservations about video art," says Main Trend's general manager Yeh Ming-hsun.

Many people think that Chen has some special talent for gaining more exposure abroad than at home, but actually he just contacts foreign galleries and museums via email. In Europe, there are many opportunities to exhibit and many people involved in the art world. Counting group shows, his works are exhibited abroad 15 to 20 times a year. For an artist who's "doing OK," he says, that's nothing out of the ordinary.

Worker philosopher

Chen, whose art often focuses on the lower classes, looks the part of a rough laborer in his flip-flops, T-shirts, and shorts. But when talking about the aesthetics and meaning expressed in his video, he is quite thoughtful. He says things like, "International capital flows will come to an end, and Marx long ago discussed the alienation of labor," giving him the air of a "worker philosopher."

Recently, he was invited to participate in New Orleans' biennale. Collecting material to use, he came across a topic for discussion. He says that the reason that black and poor people in America often have no choice but to turn to drug dealing, robbery, and gangs is that the system doesn't even allow them the space or opportunity to open a Taiwan-style street stall. "The economic system has to have some flexibility. If the Taiwanese government decided one day to eliminate the underground economy, we'd surely overthrow it because the underground economy is the way for the poor to turn their lives around."

Chen's artistic philosophy comes from his own life experiences. His works often leave a tangled web for viewers. Whether they can find their way through or not depends on their own views on life.