During the martial law period, along the coastline engulfed by solemn silence, a group of anachronistic architectures emerged out of nowhere. UFO Houses, featuring colorful and smooth oval-shaped plastic contours, were elegantly named “Exquisite Space Pod Houses” by the locals. In a way, it secretly became a hub of futurism even before Taiwanese society fully embraced modernism. Man-made landscapes manifested a brand-new value in line with the great utopian vision: the future is light, colorful, technological, consumer-oriented and sentimental. Even an enduring myth passed down from generation to generation cannot escape the fate of word of mouth. A half century later, we stood on the same coast with a retrospective gaze. The landscapes of the past looked utterly foreign, but when we attempted to look into the future, we were soon overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu.
Chun-Tien CHEN studied at the Tainan National University of the Arts, Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary. As a filmmaker, he explores various fields of visual arts including documentary, animation and experimental films. His animation work Sick Building Syndrome (2015) was presented at Taipei Film Festival and Kaohsiung Film Festival. His documentary work, In Memory of the ChinaTown (2016), uses experimental methods to explore urban renewal issues, selected in the New Asian Currents competition of Yamagata International Film Festival. He made his fiction film debut A Long Goodbye to the Origin at Kaohsiung Film Festival 2021.
