This is brilliant. A portrait of a Taiwanese opera VHS tape traders. Lots of colors, lots of VHS effects.

Taiwan Video Club profiles a group of cost-cutting Asian immigrants who collect and trade videotapes of their favorite epics broadcast daily in Taiwan. Their pirate distribution marked a turning point in the history of consumer video when stories that were once passed on from mouth to mouth were then passed on from VCR to VCR. Taiwan Video Club's visuals were duplicated from the "low grade" tape that united these diasporic women to their native culture and common past. Degenerated and heavily inscribed with text, the video is an invitation and challenge to work through one's own process of translation while viewing.

Stephanie Bailey in LEAP:
Taiwan Video Club (1999), in which Lin interviews Taiwanese housewives about the underground trade of pirated Taiwanese and Japanese soap operas copied onto VHS tapes modified to accommodate up to six hours of footage each. One woman speaks excitedly and with an American lilt about the historical stories embedded in these soap operas. She recalls one series with a character she sees as the ideal woman: “Very weak, very gentle,” the lady explains. “Sensitive to weather, flowers, everything…we all wanted to be like her; so intelligent but so helpless.”

In one frame, Lin films a stack of videotapes, with titles including The Story of Taiwan and For Love or Country. For the women being interviewed, these tapes tell the history of their culture, so that “in different places everyone would know the same story.”

Alex Jenseth in Rhizome:
Lana Lin’s work, on display at Gasworks in London, confronts us with a number of topics: translation, identity, cultural production, and familial reflection. In doing so, her films seek to destabilize our assured hold on what we imagine we understand. In Taiwan Video Club (1999), Lin presents a Taiwanese subculture that records, trades, and holds dear, video recordings of miniseries that are shown daily on television. As we watch a participant in this practice explain her life with her collection of recordings, Lin cuts in clips and sound from the series, providing insight to a specific time and place, not to mention a specific medium which dominated it. As we come to understand this unit of Taiwanese pop-culture, Lin engages in a running commentary of sorts, provided through visual metaphors and homonyms.

Recording from TV to VHS could be seen as an apt analogy for the process of translation and cultural production that Lin seeks to examine. The final “product” in each case is a copy of the original, inevitably tinged by the process. As anyone who has spent time battling with VHS can tell you, no copy is ever pristine; there remain in the copy the battle scars of mediation: warped sound and image, deterioration of picture, the familiar markings of “CUE”, “STILL”, and “CH-3” all mark the material as part of a process and mode of production unique to video. The lens of Taiwan Video Club operates as a check on the lens of the viewer. Though we come to understand a great deal about this world of VHS-naughts, and Taiwanese daytime television, Lin maintains a field of formal intervention never lets us settle on any one interpretation of what we see.