Words and phrases first started to make an appearance in Yang’s works in the early 1990s. Indeed, "Made in Taiwan – Slogan Section" (1990) contained the phrases “Made in Taiwan” and “Tomorrow will be better.” Interestingly, the artist continued to use “Made in Taiwan” throughout his extremely varied portfolio of work on history and culture. However, these phrases were not merely one of multiple creative elements they also served their own distinctive function and in addition to establishing a “picture-language” relationship with depicted images added to the “realism” of the pieces. At the same time, the words and phrases also had a title type visual effect when viewed. This achieved the objective desired by the artist and despite differences in the meaning of individual words the creative motivation remained entirely consistent.

For a long time now, the relationship between political language used by government officials and real society has been reduced to something akin to the rules of linguistics. What this means is that certain words and phrases are sufficient to signify a social phenomenon and the relationship between people and society or politics can be similarly constructed on the basis of artificial methods that manipulate language. In "Made in Taiwan – Politics Section", Yang Mao-lin demonstrates how political language is used and showcases the fact that this approach is so ingrained as to completely hide the reality of politics, which as a result becomes largely unknowable to normal people.