Ling Chi Kao
Chen Chieh-jen’s Lingchi Echoes calmly yet forcefully condemns the many forms of Western colonial domination Taiwan has endured. Its images feel like dream-images from collective memory, buried in the viewer’s unconscious and demanding a response. Projected across three screens at a slow, poetic pace, the work connects historical violence to contemporary Taiwanese society. Hovering between madness, agony, and ecstatic transcendence, the imagery turns viewing into an unsettling confrontation. Though based on a once-obscure historical document, its reenactment of lingchi in the twenty-first century feels like looking at images of hell. Loaded with colonial, historical, cinematic, punitive, and aesthetic meanings, the slowed image compels the viewer to stare—at history, at violence, and at the self. Lingchi becomes a metaphor for First World power over the vulnerable under globalization.