A long-time denizen of Taiwan’s art world, Chen Chieh-Jen’s work from the 1980s to the present has been exhibited internationally. To the local scene, he became renowned for Dysfunction No. 3, an interventionist performance on Taipei’s streets in the early 1980s. Wandering along dressed as hooded inmates, Chen and his contemporaries rejoindered government control through civil disobedience, forging a public sphere during times of oppression: From 1949 to 1987, the country was subjected to martial law, an emergency state governance banning free speech and public assembly. Distancing Taiwan from the neighboring People’s Republic of China, the innately anti-communist martial law coerced power through a one-party system, with the military and secret police assuming control. In Chen’s multifaceted work, the Japanese rule over Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century, the country’s kinship with the US during the Cold War, and its present-day neoliberalization feature as periodic points of departure.