An outdoor exhibition of photographs and written accounts of the Sunflower movement protests last year yesterday went on display along Taipei’s Qingdao E Road, outside the Legislative Yuan.
Youth activist groups mounted the photos and other items upon the large barbed-wire barricades that the police erected around the legislative compound last week in anticipation of a possible mass protests on the Sunflower movement’s one-year anniversary.
The exhibition focused on the protests that began on March 18 last year, in which activists occupied the legislature’s main chamber for 24 days to protest against the government’s handling of a proposed service trade pact with China.
Photo: Wu Chang-hung, Taipei Times
The exhibition organizers, led by members of the Black Island National Youth Front, said they wanted to convey the “diversity and divergences” among Sunflower participants. They said they chose photos that depicted the movement through the eyes of the masses and ordinary protesters, rather than focusing on student leaders.
“We wanted the photos to depict the experiences of the ‘humans’ in the movement, instead of ‘deities’ who have already received a lot of media coverage,” student Chen Wei-chen (陳韋辰) said.
Chen said written accounts that contained conflicting views on events during the movement were put on display because the Sunflower movement was “never a cohesive whole in the first place,” but rather a convergence of different paths and groups.
All the photos, written accounts and film clips in the exhibition were submitted by people who took part in the movement last year, Chen said.
The exhibition is scheduled to remain up through today.
Other events are scheduled for tonight on Qingdao E Rd to mark the one-year anniversary of the March 23 protests at the Executive Yuan and the brutal police crackdown that followed.
On the night of March 23 last year, mounting dissatisfaction over the lack of an official response to the Sunflower movement led some students to force their way past barricades to stage a sit-in at the Executive Yuan.
Then-premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) ordered the police to clear the protesters by the following dawn, resulting in scores of protesters and others being injured by police officers armed with batons, shields and water cannons.
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