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Film screening and Q&A with directorsChina Centre, Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre
Dissent on the Streets, in Print, and Through the Lens:
Citizens and the State under Authoritarianism
Commemorating the forthcoming 40th anniversary of the lifting of martial law in 1987, this transnational screening features two documentaries, Eyes on Democracy (民主之眼) and Behind the Scenes (幕後吶喊). Featuring nine veteran photojournalists, Eyes on Democracy presents Taiwan’s democratic awakening through the journalists’ lenses. It traces how their careers coincided with the emergence, expansion and diversification of socio-political movements since the early 1980s. Their decisions about where, when, what and how to capture the emotions and politics of either a large-scale rally or a localised sit-in have shaped how these movements are remembered and interpreted by later generations. Focusing on twenty activists dedicated to protecting the public sphere, Behind the Scenes narrates the contribution of underground opposition magazines (黨外雜誌) to Taiwan’s democratisation. It zooms in on the activists’ strategies, collaborations and means of survival while they were under intensive surveillance by the authoritarian state. Their defiance of state censorship, which led to imprisonment and, at times, financial ruin, has left behind a powerful legacy concerning the transformative power of writing and reading. At a time when artificial intelligence can generate images in a split second to accompany news stories that may themselves be produced by machines, the two documentaries also drive home a critical message about how ideas, concepts, cultures and practices travel across time, societies and geographical boundaries.
For the three of us, Yi-Chieh Chung, Tzu-ming Huang and Isabelle Cockel, film screenings function not only as a means of dissemination but also as a platform for two-way communication between filmmakers and audiences. Audience responses to our pilot versions inform subsequent editing and revision. Films are re-edited for international audiences based on our understanding of different audiences’ needs and expectations. Filmmakers also act as mediators of information exchange, sharing insights gained from different audiences across screening sites, both in person and through social media. As a result, the screening process becomes a site of knowledge co-production. Audience responses, alongside the films’ content, emerge as dynamic sources of interpretation.
Isabelle Cockel is Associate Professor in East Asian and Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on labour and marriage migration in East Asia. She analyses how the state instrumentalises immigration for political and economic interests. She has published about sovereignty, citizenship, motherhood, activism, and irregular farm work. She utilises academic blogs and film screening to raise public awareness about inequality and injustice embedded in migration. She also does research on the Cold War in East Asia regarding psychological warfare and clandestine press. She argues that the use of women’s voices for propaganda campaign constructs an ideological soundscape across the Taiwan Strait. She proposes the concept of dissent assemblage with which to analyse how clandestine press constructs a public sphere for ideational circulation. She is Associate Editor of Political Studies Review and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies.
Chung Yi-Chieh（Richard） was born in Taipei and originally studied computer engineering. Driven by a deep passion for the art of photography, he returned to school after graduating from junior college, enrolling in a university college of communication with a major in photography. After graduation, he joined a newspaper as a photojournalist.
In 2002, Chung left the newspaper and entered graduate school to study sociology. That same year, he was invited by Reuters to serve as a photojournalist for its Taiwan bureau, and in 2005 he was promoted to chief photographer of the Taiwan bureau. In 2006, he was admitted to the doctoral program in sociology at National Taiwan University. After completing his coursework, he left academia to make documentaries for Da Ai Television, believing it more important to put his expertise into social practice.
Even so, he has remained devoted to research in the sociology of photography, with an unwavering concern for Taiwan’s photojournalism community. He co-founded the Taiwan Press Photographers Association (TPPA), independently produced Dance with Images, a documentary about Taiwan’s post–World War II photojournalists, and has published numerous research papers on Taiwanese photojournalism and the working world of photojournalists. In recent years, he has been commissioned by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts to write biographies of several Taiwanese documentary photographers active in the 1980s, including Pan Hsiao-hsia, Tsai Ming-te, and Huang Tzu-ming.
In 2022, Chung invited nine Taiwanese press photographers from the 1980s to take part in Eyes on Democracy. Through their photographs, their reflections, and their own first-hand accounts, the film seeks to reconstruct Taiwan’s journey from martial law to democracy and freedom.
In Taiwan, photography remains an academic discipline that is still developing and has yet to receive the recognition it deserves; as a result, the voices of photographers have never truly been heard by the public. Chung believes that the field must build a foundation of materials—research literature, audiovisual records, books, and more—before photography can one day be established as a professional discipline. As a photographer and filmmaker, he believes that only by writing history ourselves can we leave a historical record behind. Likewise, as Taiwanese, we must write our own history, so that future generations will understand the efforts of those who came before them—and know how to carry on protecting what was won.
Tzu-ming Huang
Born in 1960 and a graduate of the National Taiwan Academy of Arts in 1982, Tzu-ming Huang is a veteran photojournalist and acclaimed artist known for his humanist approach to his subjects. Spanning more than 40 years, his career began in magazine and newspaper photojournalism, culminating in his appointment as Director of the Photo Desk at the China Times, Taiwan’s largest broadsheet newspaper. Immersed in the socio-political movements of the 1980s and 1990s, he and his peers became a familiar presence on the streets, capturing critical moments when citizens and the state clashed in the struggle for democracy, justice, and equality. After withdrawing from frontline reporting to the newsroom, he devoted part of his directorship to completing an unprecedented publicly funded project to digitise news photographs.
Huang is also known for his artistic work portraying marginalised and stigmatised communities. His camera documented the later lives of Chinese prisoners of war from the Korean War who were repatriated to Taiwan, Taiwanese Comfort Women during the period of Japanese colonial rule, and Indigenous Peoples engaged in efforts towards cultural revitalisation. Exhibited in New York, Tokyo, Busan, Budapest, and Portsmouth, these images of former prisoners of war and Comfort Women reveal how the impact of war remains a lingering pain, endured in memory and inscribed upon the body. His long-term documentation of Indigenous peoples’ traditional livelihoods and handicrafts foregrounds their agency and autonomy.
Huang has also contributed significantly to the development of photojournalism as both a profession and an art form. He served as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Journalism at National Chengchi University and in the Departments of Graphic Communication and Journalism at Shih Hsin University. He also served as a project reviewer for the Hakka Affairs Council and as a judge for the Council of Indigenous Peoples’ Macabay Art Awards, as well as the Excellence in Journalism Awards. In addition, he has judged the Second China International Press Photo Awards (CHIPP), the National Geographic International Photography Competition, the TAIHAI Press Photo Contest, and the Taiwan Press Photo Contest.
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Dickson Poon, University of Oxford, China Centre Building, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
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