Ahead of the 35th anniversary of Chen Wen-chen’s (陳文成) supposed murder, National Taiwan University yesterday unveiled the winning designs for a planned plaza in commemoration of the incident, with the university vowing to raise public awareness of the incident, which remains an enduring reminder of the White Terror era today.
The university announced the results of a competition it held to solicit designs for the plaza. Six teams out of a total of 27 were selected.
A team comprising three students at the university’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning — Lin Tan-wei (林丹威), Ko Ya-chih (柯雅之) and Chang Tsai-yen (張彩燕) — claimed the top prize.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The trio’s design, titled Blank Space, features a black cube made of “one-way mirrors” placed at the center of the plaza in front of the library, where Chen’s body was found.
Lin said that the team drew on the black cube’s imagery because it resembles the incident’s nature.
He said that people would be able to venture into the structure through an opening in the cube, where they will find a chair on which they can sit to reflect on the incident.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The one-way mirrors are to allow people inside the cube to see out, he said.
“You think that you see it, but when you delve deep into it, you realize that what you see is gone,” he said.
Lin said that the government had resorted to false rhetoric to cover up details about the incident, and even though the team put in a great deal of effort to research the incident and tried to piece the information together, many questions remain unanswered.
It is these “blank spaces” that prevented them from seeing the full picture, Lin said.
Lin said that he hopes the design would serve as a cautionary reminder of the incident, even though all evidence linked to Chen’s death has likely long been destroyed.
Professor Chen Wen-chen Memorial Foundation chief executive officer Chen Pao-yueh (陳寶月), who is Chen Wen-chen’s elder sister, said her brother’s death made her feel powerless, because the judiciary had not brought justice.
She said that the library was not the original scene of the crime, as she believed the Taiwan Garrison Command bludgeoned her brother to death before disposing of his body outside the building.
She said she hoped that through President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policy on transitional justice and the university’s efforts to uncover the truth, the case would be solved one day.
NTU Graduate Institute of Building and Planning associate professor Huang Li-ling (黃麗玲) said that Chen Wen-chen was an alumnus of the university who sacrificed himself for democracy and social justice and that she hoped the plaza would help his name to be remembered.
Chen Wen-chen was a supporter of Taiwan’s democratic movement who frequently made donations to the pro-democracy Formosa Magazine.
In 1981, he returned to Taiwan from the US to visit his family members and was denied a return flight by the Taiwan Garrison Command, who detained Chen Wen-chen for questioning before sending officers to escort him home.
He was found dead the next morning on a lawn next to the library, with an autopsy conducted by US forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht indicating murder.
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