While shooting my previous film in 2002, I happened to get acquainted with some female laborers who became unemployed due to the planned bankruptcy of the Lian-fu Garment Factory by its owner. Their stories of the bitter constant struggle for the rights of employees reminded me of my childhood. As the first factory was constructed in my neighborhood, my neighbors and I had rushed to look at the newly-built giant buildings. It was not long afterwards that my neighbors, relatives and myself started gravitating to different factories to work as anonymous industrial laborers. This became considered a common course of life for the majority of people in my generation.

After the 90s, many industries started to move offshore. More and more factory owners purposely declared bankruptcy in the hopes of avoiding paying pensions and layoff compensations. Like many other laborers who were dismissed for similar reasons, female laborers from the Lian-fu Garment Factory still face these problems that remain unresolved until today. Having met these women in 2002, I invited them to return to the factory where they used to work for more than 20 years. The abandoned factory where this documentary was shot had been closed for 7 years.

As these female laborers wished to keep silent in the documentary as a subtle performative act, I recorded their simplest and slowest actions with my camcorder’s normal rotational speed. All of the sounds were then muted so that the film appears somewhat like a series of still images. It is through this technique of creating a different sense of time in connection with the subtle movements in the images that I have recorded not only the history of these factories but also the changed lives of these female laborers working in them.

(Factory｜Solo Exhibition | 2004.01.03-01.31)