Contemporary Asian Art

As a cheap wage country, Taiwan was one of the main centers of the textile industry in the 1960s. Beginning in 1990, however, the intensive production industry migrated to countries with even lower production costs, and many Taiwanese became unemployed.
In 2003 Chen Chieh-jen invited a number of textile workers to the previously closed Lien Fu textile factory, where they had worked for over two decades, to shoot a documentary. The abandoned factory presented itself like a "relic" of the past: many objects were still there, such as calendars, newspapers, punch clocks, tools and banners, megaphones and loudspeakers from the workers' protest against the closure. What was missing was replaced, and the workers agreed to take up their work again for the film. The camera concentrates on their body language while working, on simple actions and the atmosphere of the space. Several fragmentary sequences from the time of the protest against the closure of the factory were edited in. In keeping with the women's wish not to speak, the film was shot without sound. Chen Chieh-jen takes a phenomenon of globalization and translates the transformation of the textile industry in Asia into a highly professionally made 35mm film.

See an excerpt in the following link.