Just before walking up the last flight of stairs to the main exhibition space for Shifting Horizons: The Generation of Emancipatory Architecture in Taiwan, you enter a small room. There’s a double wall of images and old newspaper headlines: the outer layer is mounted on glass, behind which more images and text are visible, flooded in red light. It prompts you to move around, peering through gaps to the second wall, making it challenging to read the content. It makes you very aware of being a body moving in space and how your surroundings impact your posture.

Headlines on display read “Nan County decides to step up inspections of banned books and periodicals” and “Ministry of Education final discussion: Hair length and hair style of middle school students”. Photos—interspersed with statements from people who’d lived through that era—show vehicle searches, a military parade and new concrete housing complexes. These are fragments from the martial law period (1949–1987) in Taiwan. To the right of this wall hangs a copy of the presidential order that lifted martial law. It sets the stage for Shifting Horizons, which focuses on the years 1980 to 2010 and the work of architects who graduated around the end of the martial law period.

• Tags: Issue 39, Taiwan, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal