Lim Giong: From the Platform of 'Moving Forward' to Cannes for The Assassin — Three Decades of a Hokkien Rock Defector

30-second overview: On December 7, 1990, 26-year-old Changhua native Lin Chih-feng turned Hokkien song from melancholy into rock with "Moving Forward" (向前走), and the album sold so fast Rock Records' warehouse couldn't keep up with restocking. Four years later he burned down his idol persona with an electronic noise album, then nearly vanished from public view. He hadn't vanished — he'd walked into Hou Hsiao-hsien's editing room. Over the next three decades, he transformed from spokesperson for the New Hokkien Song Movement into an electronic music pioneer, winning four Golden Horses for Best Original Film Score, one Cannes Soundtrack Award, and one National Award for Arts, crossing the Taiwanese and Chinese cinema scenes — completing one of the rarest identity defections in Taiwan pop music history.

The Watermelon-Cut Boy on the Platform

On December 7, 1990, Rock Records released a strange album.¹

The cover featured a young man with naturally curly watermelon-cut hair in a white shirt, standing on a Taipei Main Station platform. The album was titled Moving Forward (向前走), with the title also printed in Hokkien romanization "Hiòng-tsiân-kiânn" beneath — a slightly provocative gesture for the time. The mainstream of the 1990 Hokkien song market was the lament path: Jody Chiang, Hung Jung-hung, Yeh Chi-tien — sorrowful in tone, enka in arrangement, as if Hokkien as a language could only be used for losers' songs.

Producers Bobby Chen, Jonathan Lee, and Chou Shih-hui decided to do the opposite. They wove rock into Hokkien, letting the singer use a youthful "I'm going to make it in Taipei" voice to sing the excitement of a train pulling into the station: "I used to hear people sing 'Taipei isn't my home,' but I don't feel that way at all."²

The singer was Lim Giong (林強), born Lin Chih-feng (林志峰) on June 7, 1964 in Changhua.³ When he was doing military service in Matsu, the army screened Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1983 film The Boys from Fengkuei. After watching, he thought: so Taiwanese cinema can be made like this, can have so much feeling for this land. He resolved that after discharge, if he couldn't get into music, he'd go learn cinema, even starting from Hou Hsiao-hsien's assistant.⁴ He didn't expect that after discharge, the music path would open first — and explode.

📝 Curator's note
The year "Moving Forward" went big, the KTV Hokkien song chart was dominated by it for months. Just three years after martial law ended, the whole island was learning the lesson "you don't have to feel ashamed." Lim Giong used a youthful voice not trained in melancholy to sing out the collective accent of that era. The melancholy mode of Hokkien song was shaped by historical circumstances; "Moving Forward" demonstrated another possibility.

Fastest Train, Fastest Brakes

After Moving Forward, 1992's Spring Wind Young Brother (春風少年兄) kept selling. Lim Giong became an idol overnight, packaged by Rock Records as an image artist: wearing Armani, going on variety shows, playing the role of Hokkien rock spokesperson.

He didn't like it.

In an interview, Lim Giong said: "Sometimes I quite deliberately try to escape that person from before."⁵ In his fifties, he said this with a laugh, pointing at his early MVs — but in that moment, the contradiction was real.

1994's Entertainment World (娛樂世界) was his defection manifesto. The whole album's arrangements were handled by electronic pioneer Lo Pai-chi; Lim Giong went to England to record, working with producer John Fryer. Electronic dance, industrial noise, and electric guitar reverb mixed together; the cover was abstract painting, completely against the salon-photo album-cover convention of the time. The market didn't buy it.⁶

But one person noticed.

"Why Don't You Stop Singing"

In 1995, through Rock Records, Lim Giong met Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou said one thing to him: "Why don't you stop singing — being a creator is more pure."⁷

This was the beginning of the turn. In 1996, Hou was preparing Goodbye South, Goodbye (南國再見，南國) and asked Lim Giong to do the score and theme song. Lim Giong was so nervous he said he "didn't know how to do film music." Hou's reply: "If you don't know, can't you ask people!" — and took him to study with teachers at the music conservatory.⁷

Lim Giong brought the language of electronic synthesizers into film, working with creators from Taiwan's underground music scene (LTK Commune, Lei Kuang-hsia), and produced a score Hou described as "every track fits perfectly." His "Self-Destruction" (自我毀滅) won him Best Original Film Song at the 33rd Golden Horse Awards,⁸ and he stood on the awards stage just as he was beginning his film scoring work.

The National Culture and Arts Foundation later wrote of him: what Lim Giong pursued was "abstract atmosphere and scent" rather than melodies that aided narrative or rendered emotion.⁹ He was never "scoring films" — he was "shooting another film with music."

Walking Into a Dark Editing Room

In 2001, Hou Hsiao-hsien asked Lim Giong to score Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波).

This film about generations at the millennium turn, nightclubs and the misty nights of Taipei, was credited to Lim Giong (Yokichi Hayashi) and Japanese composer Yoshihiro Hanno.¹⁰ Electronic beats seeped into the film's light and shadow. The slow-motion shot of Shu Qi crossing the Zhongxiao East Road footbridge at the opening was later homaged by countless Sinophone directors. Lim Giong and Hayashi won the 38th Golden Horse Award for Best Original Film Score for this film.¹¹

After this, almost every Hou Hsiao-hsien film carried Lim Giong's name. In 2015, The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘) won Best Director at Cannes; Lim Giong's score was also recognized in the Cannes Soundtrack Award (outside the main competition) — an international affirmation of Taiwan's electronic film score by Cannes.¹²

💡 Did you know
Lim Giong's first acting role was also Hou Hsiao-hsien's. In 1993's Dust of Angels (少年吔，安啦！), he played a marginal Taiwanese gangster. That performance made Hou remember him; it also confirmed for Lim Giong that he wanted to be more behind the camera.

From Taipei to Shanxi: Fifteen Years of Jia Zhangke in China

Jia Zhangke was introduced by Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Starting with 2004's The World, Lim Giong scored almost all of Jia Zhangke's most important films of the next fifteen years: Dong (2006), Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008), A Touch of Sin (2013), Ash Is Purest White (2018).¹³ Their working method was very different from Hou's — Jia always brought Lim Giong to location before filming. For 24 City, they walked through the Chengdu factory together; for Still Life, Lim Giong took the boat to Fengjie and lived there for several days, letting himself truly enter that state.¹³

Jia Zhangke once said: "Music is like oxygen — it provides us with the simplest and most necessary emotional help."¹⁴

This is exactly Lim Giong's approach. He used electronic music to handle the absurd disjunctions of contemporary China, blending the Zen of Eastern folk into Western electronic beats. Still Life won the Venice Golden Lion in 2006, and Lim Giong won the 43rd Golden Horse Award for Best Original Film Score for Doze Niu's Do Over (一年之初).¹⁵ In 2013, for A Touch of Sin, he opened with music based on the traditional opera concept of "Chu Jiang" (出將), winning Best Original Film Score at the Golden Horse again.¹⁵ In 2016, he won the same Golden Horse award a fourth time, for Midi Z's documentary City of Jade (翡翠之城).¹⁶

📝 Curator's note
In the same decade, behind two of the most important Sinophone film auteurs from Taiwan — Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke — was the same person at the synthesizer. He found a sound language that belonged both to Taipei nights and Shanxi factories: lonely electronic notes, the kind that grow on their own in urban ruins.

Words Are Spent, Only Music Remains

In August 2017, The Reporter published an in-depth interview, written by Wang Yi-chun, with a heavy title: "Words Are Spent, Only Music Remains — Lim Giong's Way of Withdrawal."⁵

He said he wouldn't return to the stage as a singer because "there's nothing more to say."⁵ He converted to Buddhism, became a long-term vegetarian, and his studio setup is not complex — mainly an Ableton Live digital audio workstation and an old MicroKORG synthesizer. With these two things, in his Sanxia home, he continues to make sound that no one has commissioned.

He mostly doesn't take commercial film scores, "because directors will demand a clear emotion, and I can't fake an emotion I don't feel."¹⁷

In 2018, Lim Giong won the 20th National Award for Arts — the first time the award was given to a film music creator.⁹ At the awards ceremony he barely spoke.

Coordinates of a Defector

When you lay out Lim Giong's trajectory, the most counterintuitive thing isn't "superstar turns to behind-the-scenes" — that's a common move in pop music history. The counterintuitive part is the timing: he withdrew from the mainstream market in 1996, the year he should have been pressing his advantage hardest. He was 32.

Six Golden Horse Awards, one Cannes Soundtrack Award, one National Award for Arts — from the boy who finished watching The Boys from Fengkuei in the Matsu barracks.

The New Hokkien Song Movement marked his starting point; the Golden Horses, Venice, and Cannes mark where he went. And between these two coordinates is a thirty-year story of escape.

That train left the Taipei Main Station platform a long time ago. The watermelon-cut boy never got back on to sing. In a quieter place, he opens his laptop and makes sound no one commissioned.

Further reading:

• Hou Hsiao-hsien — Lim Giong's first cinema teacher, the central figure of Taiwan New Cinema
• The Evolution of Taiwanese Hokkien Song — The cultural wave to which Lim Giong's "Moving Forward" belonged, the lineage from lament-mode Hokkien to rock Hokkien
• Chia Yung-chieh — A Taiwanese public figure who similarly completed an identity transition, from celebrity status to public-governance mobilization

References