Wu Rwei Ren holds a BA in Political Science from National Taiwan University and a PhD in Politics from the University of Chicago. He is now Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. He is the translator of the Chinese version of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and the author of Prometheus Unbound: When Formosa Reclaims the World (Acropolis; 2016). His research interest lies in comparative historical analysis, comparative historical analysis, intellectual history and literature. The places he is most concerned with are Taiwan, Japan and the world at large.
Skaya Siku is of the Seejiq Truku descent from Nantou. Born 1981, she grew up in a family of an indigenous-Han marriage, which led her to understand the importance of promoting interracial reconciliation. Having studied and had research experience in multiple fields, including political sciences, cinema and visual anthropology, she once worked as a journalist for Central News Agency, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She is also a board member to both the Taiwan Women’s Film Association and Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography. She has endeavored in the studies, production, education and curating of indigenous cinema.
Born in 1976, Langpaw Kaljuvung is of Paiwan indigenous descent and is from the Tjuabal Tribe in Daren Township of Taitung County, Taiwan. A hunter with extensive knowledge on the mountains, he is also the leader of Eagle Warrior Troop and a performer of Paiwan Saljingusan tribal sacrificial rites, which is a tribal lineage based in the area near the Dajhu River. Langpaw Kaljuvung founded Talem in 2018, an educational platform that brings together indigenous tribal culture, ecology, and humanity. Talem offers an educational space and promotional platform for people of the tribe to return to and become reacquainted with Paiwan traditions, with educational seminars organized based on seasonal agricultural affairs, hunting activities, rituals and ceremonies. Talem’s mission is to tangibly put the tribe’s values to practice and to preserve and pass down its culture.
The Libera Collective was founded at the end of 2018 by a group of people working in the fields of art, academia, and various other industries.
The term, “libera”, holds two meanings, and one is “to console forgotten souls”. This echoes with the collective’s objective to bring the spirits of White Terror fighters back to their homeland and for them to be recognized by their descendants. The other significance behind the term is “to revive the spirits of contemporary people”. Through learning about the resistance that took place in the past, present conditions are reexamined, as we rediscover and learn about the strength that we possess inside.
Born in Taiwan in 1973, Kao Jun Honn received a BFA from Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) in 1998 and a PhD in Art Creation and Theory from Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA) in 2017; he is now Adjunct Assistant Professor at TNUA. Kao’s creative work mainly involves body, video, project-based action and writing as the interface, and has focused on issues related to history, space, life politics, neoliberalism, East Asia and indigeneity. Since 1995, he has held multiple solo exhibitions as well as participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials in Taiwan and abroad. He has joined residency programs in Hong Kong, France and the UK, and is the recipient of multiple Taishin Arts Awards. Kao is the author of Bubble Love; The Home Project; AAET Archives of Aesthetics of Existence in Taipei; Novel: In the Name of Cheng-Kung Chang; Multitude: East Asia Art Tramps and Occupation; Spinning Top: Bio-politics and My Creation, of which the last three were collectively awarded the Annual Publication Award in the Golden Tripod Awards for Publications. The documentary Llyong Topa he produced has been nominated in the “Taiwan Competition” category in the 12th Taiwan International Documentary Festival.
HSU Manray is an independent curator and art critic based in Taipei. His recent exhibitions include “The Sky Is the Limit: 2000 Taipei Biennial" (with Jerome Sans, Taipei Fine Arts Museum); "Wayward Economy" (2004, Taipei); "Naked Life" (2006, MOCA Taipei); Liverpool Biennial in 2006 (with Gerardo Mosquera); 2008 Taipei Biennial (with Vasif Kortun); Forum Biennial of Taiwanese Contemporary Art in 2010 (Taipei Contemporary Art Centre); "The South: an Art of Asking and Listening" (2017, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts); "Autosrada Biennale: The Future of Borders" (2017, Prizren, Kosovo); “Herbal Urbanism: An artistic project on cosmopolitics” (2018, Hong Gah Museum, Taipei); “When Kacalisian culture meets the vertical city: Greater Sandimen Contemporary Art” (2019, Taiwan Aboriginal Culture Park, Pingtung).
Chen Bo-Wen, a doctor with his own private practice in Taipei’s Beitou District, is a prominent contemporary art collector in Taiwan. With a unique collection focusing on social justice and history rethinking, Chen stands out amongst conventional collectors that tend to see art as a way to allocate and convert their assets. Chen pays close attention to a wide array of contemporary art issues and projects and is also a long-term sponsor of experimental art projects, spaces, and events, such as TheCube Project Space.
CBW Collection
Using “MIX” as a general technique to achieve a new subjective identity through sensibility, such identity surfaces with a dynamic informed by constant conflicts and reconstruction. In this dynamic process, even though a temporary balance or progress might be possible, there is still more to be done; and the unfinished ambitions require steadfast progress and unswerving diligence on this path towards an envisioned future.
Unfinished Ambitions Short Film Festival is an additional project to Assembly of Communities: MIX. Interweaving multiple short films to create a dialogue, it adopts the perspectives of the young generation and reveals a central, active attitude to show how the young generation deals with the diversified and multiplural relations, along with the pervasive, interrupting conundrums that come with these relations, when they endeavor to accomplish the unfinished ambitions. As the new subjective identity gradually becomes assembled and takes shape during this dynamic process, the young generation must also deal with dialogues, communication and even negotiations with the others formed/split in this process of dealing with the issue of subjectivity; and these dialogues, communication and even negotiations will continue intersecting to construct the dynamic identity, contributing to the unfinished ambitions.
Writing FACTory is a long-term project, a non-site space and a virtual factory producing discourse, research and printed matter concerning writing/publishing as artistic and political practice. Initiated by Taiwanese artist Chang Wen-Hsuan in 2018, this ‘FACTory’ serves as an entrepot of experiences and discourses. Writing in this sense is not only a technique of operating words in specific field but the most efficient way to accomplish political, aesthetical and other practices. Its practices include field survey, annual meeting on writing, workshop and archive interpretation.
Su Beng (1918-2019) is the pen name of Shih Chao-Hui, a Taiwanese revolutionary, political activist, writer, historian and one of the most important leaders in the left-wing Taiwan independence movement, who insisted on the revolutionary goal of Taiwan independence. Since he was accused of being “the first command of the rebellion” and became wanted by the Taiwan Garrison Command within and without Taiwan in 1952, he began an exile in Japan for forty-one years, where he ran a Chinese restaurant called “New Gourmet” in Ikebukuro Tokyo’s, which became the source of funding for the Taiwan independence movement and a base of the revolution. In 1962, he published the Japanese version ofof History of Taiwanese in 400 Years. In 1967, after failing to unite various Taiwan independence groups in Japan to form the Taiwan Independence Union, he founded the Tokyo-based Taiwan Independence Association in June, which has become one of the few socialist Taiwan independence organizations that emphasizes on active public activities within Taiwan as its main battle field to carry out the independent movement. After 1975, he shifted from armed revolutionary activities to indoctrination and organization training. In addition to giving lectures, his other endeavors included the Taiwan Crowd underground radio station that ran from 1996 to 1999 as well as the propagandist fleet that is still active today. In 2016, he publishedThe Memoirs of Su Beng. He passed away at the age of 103 in 2019.
A contemporary interdisciplinary conceptual artist, Chen Kai Huang’s practice focuses on the exploration and understanding of issues interwoven with social aesthetics, contemporary politics and history, embodied by “fluid cultural ontological variations,” “trans-subjectivity paralogic” and “intervention arts”; he is also a practitioner of the aesthetics of Taiwan independence. Since the end of the 1980s, Chen has embarked on his journey of interdisciplinary art projects/project-based creations (conceptual performance, video, new media and interdisciplinary multimedia spatial installation) to respond to these issues. Over the course of more than three decades (until today), he has launched more than a hundred art projects – that are collectively entitled Measurement of Inter-Cultures – that all revolve around the emphasis and collective imagination of cultural geography, land and identity.
