Battle City 1 – The Glory of Taiwan & Battle City 2 – Economic Miracle

Chang mostly creates video installations, conceptual projects, and animations. In his works, he aims to construct a virtual world situated in between reality and imagination by means of narration. The artist spent several years building a small-scale city that was not modeled on any existing one but instead was constructed on the basis of his impressions of cities and his memories as a child. The first two episodes of this project, Battle City 1 – The Glory of Taiwan and Battle City 2 – Economic Miracle, will both be screened at the fair.

The first episode, The Glory of Taiwan, depicts collective hysteria in the face of incompetence. The second episode, Economic Miracle, portrays an imagination of how capitalism operates in its extreme form in a city. An unrecognized political entity has been transformed into a special economic zone, where ideological martial law has been replaced by economic martial law to further control the population. It is this form of microcosmic politics that the city model attempts to represent.

The storyline starts from a character, Chen Chih-Chiang, a nobody with a lowly socioeconomic status. After the pursuit of a woman he admires (Xiaoming) and being turned down, Chen becomes a terrorist attempting to destroy the world out of despair. Subsequently, he ends up being wanted by the government and the one whom every person in Taiwan is after. The U.S. government, as the protector of Taiwan, is so worried that they send an army for military operations, which further results in countries around the world setting up military bases in Taipei.