Freddy Lim: From Chthonic Frontman to Parliament, Turning Taiwan’s History Into a Public Voice

30-second overview: Freddy Lim (林昶佐) is the lead vocalist of Chthonic, one of the early initiators of Megaport Festival, a former chair of Amnesty International Taiwan, and one of the most visible figures of Taiwan’s post-Sunflower third-force politics entering parliament. Chthonic wrote the 228 Incident, the White Terror, the Wushe Incident, Taiwanese mythology, and ghost narratives into black metal, making Taiwan’s history not only something to read, but something to hear and scream out loud. Lim later helped found the New Power Party, was elected to the Legislative Yuan, left the party, survived a recall vote, and after leaving office became Taiwan’s representative to Finland. Politics was his adventure; Chthonic remains his body.

Putting Freddy Lim into one identity almost always distorts him. In 2017, The New York Times entered his legislative office and saw electronic drums, a David Bowie poster, and photographs of Chthonic performing at Liberty Square. In 2022, Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel saw a similar mixture: a “Free Tibet” image signed by the Dalai Lama, a rainbow flag, a David Bowie portrait, and Chthonic concert photos. Those objects form a cross-section of identity: metal frontman, music-festival initiator, human-rights advocate, third-force politician, legislator, recall-vote target, family caregiver, and later Taiwan representative to Finland.^12345678

These identities crowd into the same person, which is why Lim’s story is more than the contrast of “musician enters politics.” Lim did not leave Chthonic behind and then go into politics. His public identity grew from the way his music handled Taiwan’s history, languages, and sense of sovereignty. Before he sat in committee rooms or defeated long-established politicians, the person screaming Taiwan’s ghosts onstage was already searching for a voice for his time.

First, Chthonic’s Frontman

Freddy Lim was born in 1976. To many international media outlets, he is easiest to introduce as a “death-metal star turned politician”: a death-metal or black-metal vocalist who later became a Taiwanese legislator. The phrase is easy to understand, but it can reverse the story.

Before politics, Lim was already dealing with politics through music.

He grew up near the end of martial law. In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel, he recalled that in elementary school, if he spoke Taiwanese Hokkien, he could be fined NT$10 and have his name written on the blackboard. Taiwan was almost absent from textbooks; children were educated as Chinese. Only after high school, when he began reading Taiwan-related books his father brought home, did he gradually realize that the place where he lived could not be fully explained by the China-centered story in his textbooks.²

Chthonic was founded in Taipei in 1995 and from the beginning refused to be only an imitation of Nordic black metal. In a 2003 Taipei Times interview, Lim located the band’s origin in black metal’s questioning of “mother culture”: Nordic black metal looked back toward older beliefs suppressed by Christianity, while Chthonic turned that question toward Taiwan, searching for local memory pushed down by China-centered historiography, colonialism, and authoritarian rule. It borrowed the intensity of black metal, death metal, and symphonic metal, but returned the content to Taiwan: ancestral spirits, hell, spirit mediums, the Wushe Incident, the 228 Incident, the White Terror, the Takasago Volunteers, and suppressed Taiwanese history. Lim served as the band’s vocalist, and also helped build its concepts, lyrics, and public narrative. International coverage later often described Chthonic through “Taiwanese Hokkien, traditional instruments, and Taiwanese history,” because these elements made the band, in the global metal scene, immediately not another copy of a European or American act.⁹¹⁰

This makes Chthonic somewhat different from an ordinary “political band.” It did not begin with a political platform and then insert slogans into songs. It is closer to this: Taiwanese history is already full of the dead, silences, taboos, and unfinished mourning; the darkness, screams, speed, and ritual feeling of black metal became a voice that could hold that history.

💡 Did you know
The English band name Chthonic comes from a Greek concept related to the underworld and things beneath the earth. For a Taiwanese metal band that has long written about ghosts, ancestors, and historical wrongs, the name almost feels like destiny.

Lim’s stage persona is not decorative. His screams, erhu, corpse paint, joss paper, and Taiwanese Hokkien and English album versions form a sound system through which Taiwan becomes legible to the world. For international metal listeners, Chthonic may have been the first time they heard about the 228 Incident, the Wushe Incident, or Taiwan’s sovereignty situation through music. For Taiwanese listeners, Chthonic turned histories fragmented by textbooks, families, and political taboos into something people could shout together at a show.

When Lim later talked about Taiwanese Hokkien, he said it helped him imagine how his grandparents lived when they were young. This is an important clue: Chthonic’s Taiwanese Hokkien metal carries Taiwanese experience suppressed by school, state, and family silence, putting it back into body and voice.²

Official Chthonic video: the acoustic version of “Defenders of Bú-Tik Palace.” When the metal wall is stripped down, Lim’s voice, Taiwanese-language melody, and historical feeling remain in the foreground.

History and Ghosts in Black Metal

Chthonic’s most important creative method is turning Taiwan’s history into a ghost universe that keeps returning.

Seediq Bale deals with the Wushe Incident. Mirror of Retribution puts the 228 Incident into an imagination of hell and judgment. Takasago Army looks back at Indigenous Taiwanese youth conscripted by the Japanese empire in the Pacific War. Bú-Tik entangles modernity, the Budokan, and colonial memory. Battlefields of Asura pushes postwar violence and resistance in Taiwan directly onto the surface.

These albums do more than “introduce history.” They ask: if victims are never truly remembered, will they keep coming back?

Battlefields of Asura also does not come only from large national questions. In an interview with the Taiwan Hospice Organization, Lim talked about his father’s sudden death from myocardial infarction in 2017 and how he did not arrive in time to see him one last time. That same year, his daughter was born; life and death pressed on him within a short span. He said his father’s death made him realize he should cherish the people he loved and not let emotions leave wounds that could not be repaired. That feeling about death, parent-child relationships, and reconciliation also entered 2018’s Battlefields of Asura.¹¹

In a long interview after leaving office, Lim spoke about discovering his maternal grandfather’s family history and re-understanding how Chthonic had spent years writing about the White Terror, 228 victims, reincarnation, and return. He said he originally did not know how Chthonic’s story should end. When a fictional character connected with real family history, the band’s musical universe seemed finally to connect to the real world.

At its core, what Chthonic has long done is not merely “metal plus Taiwanese subject matter.” It uses metal to handle a feeling many Taiwanese people know well but often cannot speak: history has not truly passed, and family may hold stories that were never finished.

Social concern grows out of that musical work. Once the victims, ancestors, and silenced people have voices onstage, the next question follows: can those voices be heard in society?

In 2012, Lim raised a Tibetan flag onstage. The image places Freddy’s frontman identity, human-rights concern, and Taiwan’s international position in the same live setting. Photo: Hyw83516, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Megaport Festival: Turning Sound Into a Field

If Chthonic is where Lim sang history out loud, Megaport Festival is where he turned music into a public field.

Before Megaport, Lim and Doris Yeh had already spent years learning how to organize live sites through music festivals. In the late 1990s, they took over Formoz Festival. In 2000, Chthonic performed at Fuji Rock Festival in Japan and saw up close the stages, backstage operations, crowd flow, and team division of labor at a large international festival. That experience pushed them to make Formoz a more complete live experience, with multiple stages, international bands, ticketing systems, and better site operations. Later backstage, volunteer, and artist-hospitality experience from Chthonic’s appearances at international stages such as Wacken and Download also flowed back into Megaport’s site design. Megaport carried the ambition that Taiwanese local content should be presented at international standards.¹²

In 2006, Lim, Doris, and the TRA Music team launched the first Megaport Festival at Kaohsiung Harbor’s Piers 11 and 12. It inherited Taiwan’s existing music-festival lineage and quickly developed its own character: southern, harbor-side, Taiwanese Hokkien, independent bands, heavy sound, city identity, and a public feeling close to social issues. In its early period, the team deliberately made it a southern festival distinct from Taipei’s Formoz Festival. Stage names, harbor scenery, and the proportion of southern Taiwanese bands all made “Kaohsiung” part of the festival’s content.¹³¹⁴

Megaport matters far beyond “Freddy Lim also organized a music festival.” It is an intermediary. Bands become a cultural community there, audiences become a collective, and Kaohsiung becomes a cultural coordinate rather than just a performance location. Musicians curate, organize, coordinate, and shoulder box-office and public pressure there. Audiences use their bodies to confirm that Taiwan’s sound does not have to be concentrated in Taipei, and that culture does not count only when it appears on mainstream stages.

Megaport also preserves a Chthonic-like publicness. After its 2015 relaunch, the team called it a festival about life and continued to set up an NGO issue village, allowing audiences to encounter human rights, freedom, Hong Kong, Tibet, and various social issues between stages. VERSE connected this line back to concerts Lim had organized earlier around justice, anti-annexation by China, and freedom for Tibet: for these musicians, a festival can let people temporarily leave daily life, and also let reality enter the site in another form.¹⁴

Megaport was never a one-person hero story. In interviews, Lim has said that from music to Formoz, Megaport, and politics, many things were done together with Doris. He also noted that in masculine fields such as rock and music festivals, the labor of women workers is often more easily hidden. After Lim was elected legislator in 2016 and left the Megaport team, the festival was mainly pushed forward by Doris and Chthonic drummer Dani. They continued Chthonic’s spirit of deep local work and international orientation, and treated backstage operations, ticketing, performer experience, and team systems as part of the festival itself. Megaport is a southern field held up by an entire music and curation team, not only the personal achievement of one vocalist.¹⁴¹²

Megaport marks Lim’s second role shift. He was originally the person at the center of the stage; he also became someone who built stages. That difference later leads toward politics. Politics, in a sense, is also stage-building, except the stage becomes an electoral district, committee rooms, the legislative chamber, bills, and media sites. From Chthonic to Megaport, Lim’s identity as a musician was no longer only about performance; it also came to bear fields, communities, and public issues.

Entering Institutions After the Sunflower Movement

After the 2014 Sunflower Movement, a new political imagination appeared in Taiwan. Many young people, social-movement workers, and arts and culture workers began to believe that beyond street protest, some people also had to enter institutions.

Lim was one of the most visible faces of this wave. He helped found the New Power Party and in 2016 was elected legislator for Taipei’s fifth electoral district. In a 2015 Taipei Times interview, his campaign team already showed the links of the Sunflower generation: Wu Cheng, Lai Pin-yu, and others entered the team; musicians, activists, and young political workers were placed in the same electoral scene.³ The district included Wanhua and part of Zhongzheng. For a heavy-metal frontman, this election brought him into the long-term realities of constituency service and parliamentary work. It required facing petitions, budgets, local ties, legislative battles, and voters’ concrete expectations of politicians every day — far beyond symbolic candidacy.

International media loved the contrast at the time: a corpse-painted metal singer who sang Taiwanese history had entered parliament. GQ introduced him as a “death-metal star” who became an elected official, and placed the New Power Party back in the political context after the Sunflower Movement; The New York Times noticed that beyond domestic reform, he also placed Taiwan’s international recognition on the political agenda.¹⁵¹ But in Lim’s own story, this seems more like an extension of the same path. Chthonic dealt with historical memory and international visibility; Megaport dealt with cultural fields; after entering the Legislative Yuan, he encountered national defense, diplomacy, human rights, culture, and transitional justice inside institutions.

But political time is completely different from musical time.

Looking back on his Legislative Yuan experience, he said politics is unlike writing songs. In a band, several people can reach agreement and move the work forward; the Legislative Yuan is a field of more than a hundred people, and things can only be pushed bit by bit. That difference makes “idealism” no longer only about whether the sound is loud enough, but whether it can move slowly inside institutions.

This is where Lim’s story gains its thickness. Music makes people believe a song can explode in an instant; politics requires people to admit that many things can only be ground forward slowly.

Themes in Parliament

Lim’s eight years in the Legislative Yuan cannot be summarized only as “artist enters politics.”

His political work largely extended several lines already present in his music period: Taiwan’s international participation, human rights, transitional justice, cultural policy, and defense and diplomacy. From 2010 to 2014, he served as chair of Amnesty International Taiwan. In 2015 interviews, he also placed human rights, environmental issues, cultural policy, Taiwan independence, and transitional justice in the same political language of “justice and fairness.”²³ After entering parliament, he continued to pay attention to Tibet, Hong Kong, human rights, and Taiwan’s international space. The continuity between these themes and his music explains his political choices better than a case-by-case list of legislative questions.

That continuity had appeared before he entered politics. During the 2007 Ozzfest tour, Chthonic performed 20 shows in the United States and spoke in English to audiences about Taiwan being obstructed by China and unable to participate normally in international organizations. “UNlimited Taiwan” brought the demand for Taiwan’s international participation directly into a metal-tour setting. The international space Lim later discussed in parliament had already been rehearsed onstage.¹⁶

In 2015, Lim campaigned as the New Power Party legislative candidate for Taipei’s Zhongzheng and Wanhua district. After moving from the stage into institutional politics, he also had to enter this public site of streets, districts, and local mobilization. Photo: Congress Musou, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

These issues look political, but they are connected to Chthonic’s musical core: who is qualified to be heard by the world? Whose history has been silenced? How does a country without formal recognition speak for itself on the international stage?

Lim’s public role is hard to put into either “musician” or “politician” alone. It is a chain of advances: in Chthonic, he made Taiwanese history into sound; in Megaport, he made sound into a field; in parliament, he tried to turn that field into institutional practice.

The path is not romantic. Institutional politics requires negotiation, compromise, votes, organization, constituency service, and it is worn down by recalls, party splits, media battles, and local pressure. Unlike a stage, the lights cannot simply go dark, the drums cannot hit once, and the emotion cannot all concentrate in one direction.

His political work concentrated in several recurring directions. The first was international: Taiwan’s visibility in international organizations, Olympic naming, democratic alliances, and human-rights issues. The second was defense and diplomacy, especially how Taiwan maintains security and external relations under pressure from China. The third was human rights, extending his long attention to Amnesty International, Free Tibet, Hong Kong, and other issues. The fourth was culture, because he consistently saw pop music, language, historical memory, and national narrative on the same map.

These four directions are not separate. For Lim, whether Taiwan’s music can be heard by the world, whether Taiwan’s name can be said normally at international sports events, and whether Taiwanese history can be recognized in education and culture all point to the same question: how does a community long named, represented, and edited by others regain the position from which to speak?

The Wear of Politics

In 2019, Lim left the New Power Party, supported Tsai Ing-wen’s re-election, and ran for legislative re-election as an independent.⁴ After winning another term, he went through the New Power Party split, a recall vote, and a reorganization of the third-force route. The 2022 recall vote did not pass; votes in favor outnumbered those against, but did not reach the legal threshold. Analyses at the time generally placed the vote in the context of Taiwan’s recall system, party mobilization, and voter fatigue, rather than treating it only as Lim’s personal victory or defeat.¹⁷⁵ In 2023, he announced that he would not run for re-election, publicly citing the need to care for a family member with a rare disease. In November of that year, he applied to join the Democratic Progressive Party and helped with the 2024 election.⁶⁷ In 2025, the Presidential Office announced that he would serve as Taiwan’s representative to Finland, reconnecting music, international advocacy, and diplomacy in another form.⁸

This history is more complex than victory or defeat.

In interviews, Lim looked back on the political route around 2016 to 2020 and spoke about once believing that if he poured spirit, soul, and physical energy into the work and kept charging forward, he could push Taiwan farther. But party splits, partners losing elections, recall waves, and political reality forced that youthful feeling of “if we keep charging, we will arrive” to stop.

This forms a sharp contrast with music. Music is something a few people can charge into together; people who like it like it, and people who do not like it do not. Politics must integrate many people, and it must bear the results when they are not what one imagined. Lim brought ideals into institutions, and was also changed by institutions.

⚠️ Contested View
Evaluations of Freddy Lim’s politics have long been divided. Supporters see progress on human rights, international issues, and Taiwan-centered consciousness; critics question his constituency service, party route, and political choices. These disputes remain part of his parliamentary years and give his cross-over experience the wear and cost of real political sites.

A Voice Outside Institutions

Looking back on eight years of political work after leaving office, Lim pointed to one difference: politicians can use speeches, legislative questioning, or media performances to persuade people and move them rationally; music and film may last longer, making people realize years later that a work had changed them.

He did not say politics was lower, nor that music was higher. It is more like, after walking through institutions, he reconfirmed that the two kinds of work reach people differently. Politics requires negotiation, procedure, votes, and organization; music works through memory, emotion, language, and body. What makes Lim unusual is that he brought the historical sense, ghost sense, and sovereignty sense of music into the public field, and then saw in political reality that some things can be pushed through institutions, while some things can only be reached by songs.

If politics was his adventure of bringing sound into institutions, Chthonic is the root to which that sound keeps returning.

Parliament gave him another scale for understanding reality. Music let him return to a kind of publicness that politics can never fully replace.

Reordering the Roles

After leaving office, Lim did not simply “exit politics” or “go back to singing.” His roles were reordered: institutional politics moved backward, while music, international advocacy, diplomacy, and public speech each kept a place. Chthonic’s works still allow people to enter the shadows of Taiwanese history; in 2023, “Pattonkan” brought White Terror victim Uyongu Yatauyungana (Kao Yi-sheng) and family memory back into song, showing that Chthonic around Lim’s departure from parliament was not only defined by that recent Endless Aeons release cycle. Megaport and festival culture still prove that sound can gather into a field; the parliamentary experience reminds him that when ideals enter institutions, institutions will test them.¹⁸

Lim’s story therefore does not stop at the political spectacle of “metal frontman enters parliament.” He first discovered Taiwan through music, then pushed that discovery toward the stage, the city, social movements, and parliament, and finally returned to the depths of music with political fatigue and understanding.

Those roles do not cancel one another out. Chthonic leaves an album universe, Taiwanese Hokkien metal, the international metal scene, and a narrative of Taiwanese history; Megaport leaves a southern city, festival governance, and a curatorial team; the New Power Party brought the political structure of the post-Sunflower third force into his life story. Every line in Lim’s life eventually loops back to the voice that grew from that frontman.

Further Reading

Chthonic: the band universe, album context, international influence, and Taiwanese black-metal aesthetics.

Megaport Festival: the southern music festival, city identity, contemporary Taiwanese Hokkien culture, and the long evolution of a curatorial team.

Taiwanese indie music: to understand how Lim participated in the shift in language from “underground” to “independent.”

Taiwan music-festival culture: to understand Megaport’s place in Taiwan’s festival ecology.

The Sunflower Movement, the New Power Party, and Taiwan’s democratic transition: to understand the era in which Lim entered institutional politics.

圖片來源

• Freddy Lim portrait, 2012 — Photo: Hyw83516, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
• New Power Party legislative candidate Freddy Lim 03 — Photo: Congress Musou, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Chthonic and Chitose Hajime - Defenders of Bú-Tik Palace acoustic — Official Chthonic YouTube video used to show Lim’s voice and acoustic interpretation as vocalist.

Notes

References

• EP109 我們都是百萬遍中的一遍｜閃靈林昶佐, 只能喝酒的圖書館, 2026. This article uses the Traditional Chinese subtitle summary, especially the sections around 00:26, 01:04, 01:17, 02:53, and 02:58.
• Meet Freddy Lim, the Death-Metal Star Who Just Became an Elected Official in Taiwan, GQ, 2016.
• “We want a fairer society”: Freddy Lim, Taiwan’s metalhead MP, The Guardian, 2020.
• From Heavy Metal Frontman to Taiwan’s Parliament, The New York Times Chinese edition, 2017.
• Metal-Sänger und Politiker Freddy Lim: „Wir waren nie ,das freie China‘ – wir sind Taiwan“, Der Tagesspiegel, 2022.
• From Son, Husband to Father: Freddy Lim — Let Love Continue in Another Way, Taiwan Hospice Organization.
• Long Hair, Corpse Paint... Seven Years Ago Freddy Lim Defeated a KMT Military Veteran as a Band Vocalist, Business Today, 2022.
• INTERVIEW: Freddy Lim unfolds New Power Party platform, Taipei Times, 2015.
• Lim to leave NPP, back Tsai re-election bid, Taipei Times, 2019.
• Independent Legislator Freddy Lim survives recall vote, Focus Taiwan/CNA, 2022.
• Freddy Lim to retire from politics, look after family, Taipei Times, 2023.
• Independent lawmaker Freddy Lim applies to join DPP, Focus Taiwan/CNA, 2023.
• Rock star-turned-politician named Taiwan’s representative to Finland, Focus Taiwan/CNA, 2025.
• Chthonic put spin on Taiwan's past, Taipei Times, 2003.
• ChthoniC promotes Taiwan's UN bid in interview with NPR, Taipei Times, 2007.
• Chthonic’s new song “Pattonkan” drew inspiration from relatives of political victims, CNA, 2023.
• The Past and Present of Megaport Festival (Part 1), VERSE, 2022.
• The Past and Present of Megaport Festival (Part 2), VERSE, 2022.
• Many Young Taiwanese Want to Go to the Olympics With a New Flag and Anthem, TIME, 2016.
• Megaport Festival official website
• CHTHONIC official website
• Freddy Lim, founder of ChthoniC, Photo: Hyw83516, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
• New Power Party legislative candidate Freddy Lim 03, Photo: Congress Musou, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Chthonic and Chitose Hajime - Defenders of Bú-Tik Palace acoustic, official Chthonic YouTube video.
• Megaport Festival — Wikipedia
• Chthonic (band) — Wikipedia
• Freddy Lim — Wikipedia
• Taipei City Fifth Electoral District (Legislative Yuan) — Wikipedia