By Luna Wang and Angela Chiu
Taiwan once endured 38 years of martial law—one of the longest such records in the world. Portugal, too, under the Estado Novo regime, constructed a similarly closed era of silence through religion, order, and national myths.
In 1987, Taiwan lifted martial law, yet the National Security Law passed two years earlier—along with other “wartime” regulations—allowed a legalized silence to continue well into the 1990s. Even after Portugal’s 1974 revolution, the country still wrestled with the legacies of colonial wars and authoritarianism. Freedom is never realized at the moment it is declared—it must be fought for gradually, in the cracks as systems loosen.
This shared history of repression in Taiwan and Portugal will be commemorated in a free exhibition titled The Silenced Years at this year’s Toronto TAIWANfest. It will be available online and at the Boulevard Pavilion at Harbourfront Centre from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday (August 23) and Sunday (August 24).
When a regime builds invisible walls, anyone who dares to speak out may be marked as dangerous, subjected to surveillance, imprisonment, or even disappearance. And there are countless others whose pain was never named—wounds, tears, silences, deaths, and erasures etched deep into bodies, memories, and history. In the shadows of this past, some names were nearly erased entirely.
Systemic punishment silenced voices
From Kao Ju-Hua, who came under state surveillance after her father died in a political incident in 1954—forced to work as a nightclub singer to survive, then coerced by government officials into sexual transactions in exchange for military supplies and made to sign a humiliating confession—to Wang Hsiu-Hui, caught up in the 1991 Taiwan Independence Association case, investigated for her political involvement, and whose death was briefly mentioned with the truth still unknown today. These women’s fates were not isolated tragedies, but systemic punishments of the time. When we open archives and piece together oral histories, we find many stories still suspended mid-air, waiting to be heard.
We have also gathered other lesser-known tales from Taiwan: when information was blocked by the media, people used buses as covert carriers of news; a single misplaced character in a print shop nearly caused disaster; the government leveraged the power of gangs to maintain “order” or to carry out what it could not openly do itself.
Some people carried their voices far beyond the island.
Safeguarding name of Taiwan in exile
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Taiwanese made their way to Canada, building a new front line in Vancouver. They published journals, launched fundraising drives, and organized protests, bringing Taiwan’s democratic demands to the international stage.
Some wore masks in interviews to shield their families from retaliation back home; some, after completing their studies, could not return to teach in Taiwan and even missed their loved ones’ final moments. Though exiled, they safeguarded the name of Taiwan in their own ways—sustaining a cross-border struggle for freedom that lasted decades.
The exhibition will end, but the stories must not stop.
We invite you to take these voices—blossoming in the dark—out into the world: through words, images, or action, carry them further. When forgetting is a form of violence, memory becomes the most tender and unyielding form of resistance.
Let’s protect the stories the world tried to forget.
Luna Wang and Angela Chiu co-curated The Silenced Years, which can be seen at Toronto TAIWANfest from noon to 6 p.m. on August 23 and 24 at Harbourfront Centre’s Boulevard Pavilion. The Silenced Years is also an online exhibition available on the Toronto TAIWANfest website. It also includes a section on Portugal.
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