Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Tsai Pei-Kuei is an associate professor and the director of the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Art at National Kaohsiung Normal University. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Used to teach junior and senior high school students, she served as the nominator of the 19th and 20th Taishin Arts Award, the director of 2021-2022 Southern Taiwan Research and Development Center, Cultural Experiences and Education Project, and an advisor for the teacher training program of the Ministry of Education’s 2019-2022 “Cross-disciplinary Aesthetic Education Project.” She is currently a member of the Central Arts Field Advisory Group.

Tsai sees art as a way to refine thinking and practice, as well as a technique to connect people and things. Her approaches include curating, writing, and education. She has curated the exhibition The Big Popping City: A Technical Guide for a Great City, Dream Team of Kaohsiung Awards and Its Four Challenges, the exhibition The Production of Artists: the Technologies of Young Artists from Kaohsiung, and the exhibition Non-Sleep in Non-Home: Art Living in a Historical Hotel. Her writings include the paper “Art Production in the Era of Cultural and Creative Industries: Chen Chieh-Jen, Cao Fei and Andy Warhol,” and the book The Story of Art: Taiwanese Contemporary Art Through Awards and the Stories of Chou Chu-Wang and Ni Xiang. In education, she conducted the project “Dream Classes Beyond ART” and has developed various educational tabletop games, including “Big Cultural Entrepreneurs” and “Air Bubble.” In a broad sense, all her endeavors have consistently focused on the social efficacy and the ecology of art.

Tsai’s curatorial projects often span a long period of time. For instance, Dream Team of Kaohsiung Awards and Its Four Challenges, which she curated for the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2017, took an entire year and included filmed interviews with more than thirty artists. The Big Popping City: A Technical Guide For a Great City even continued for eight years: four years of research and production before being supported by the “Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts” from the National Culture and Arts Foundation, and another four years of further development due to the pandemic. The project will be wrapped up with an integrated publication comprising a tabletop game, a set of poker cards, and multiple booklets through the concept of “Artificial City: Sunshine, Air, and Water.” The project “Interested Persons,” also sponsored by National Culture and Arts Foundation, will be carried out for two years.

Lihan.umaw is a performing artist of Truku (Taroko) descent from the Bgurahbranaw Tribal Village in Zhuoxi Township, Hualien County. Her work in recent years mainly consists of performances that focus on corporality and dance, using performing art to express the intertwined experiences of duality related to gender and ethnic identity. Her creative endeavors are often confronted with societal expectations, and it is only by placing the body in the liberated language of art that a diverse and indigenous gender culture can be nurtured.

Temu.masin is of Atayal descent and comes from the Hbun Tribal Village in Fuxing District, Taoyuan City. He currently lives in Sinchen Township, Hualien County and is a dancer at the TAI Body Theatre. He specializes in literature and creative dance and uses writing and performance to express the multifaceted connections between humanity, culture, ecology, and politics. Reflecting on issues of gender, war, identity, structure, and group dynamics, Temu.masin looks in everyday spaces for readable materials to deconstruct personal social symbols. His creative approach proceeds from the perspective of social control, using symbolic interactionism as an exploratory direction, observing the behavioral dynamics of individuals and the masses.

Members of the “Women’s Self-Representatives” were recruited by the curatorial team, and the members, who had voluntarily signed up, worked with the artist, Liao Chien-Chung, in participatory workshops. The members, aged from 21 to 63, included immigrants, international students, people of LGBTQ+ identities, indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities.

Members: Yu Kuei-Chen, Li Shu-Chih, Su Yu-Sin, Li Yao, Chen Mei-Juan, Cheng Chu-Chu, Pan Siou-Jhen, Su Wen-Ju, Ho I-Lien, Lin Fang-Fu, Su Pin-Wen, Edreedr Tjaivalit, Pan Su-Yan, Lin Ko-Chun, Chen Yi-Ran, Ku Yi-Lin, Mai Yun-Xuan, Yang Wei-Huai, Wu Fei-Yue

Liao Chien-Chung is an alumnus of the Taipei National University of the Arts and a member of the artist collective, Nation Oxygen. He specializes in using exquisite craftsmanship and seeks to use an approach of model-making and simulation to emulate real events and objects that are not what they appear to be. Through challenging what people have taken for granted, the artist also brings to the surface the life stories and social implications behind the simulated objects. Liao has presented solo exhibitions at the Eslite Gallery, IT Park, Double Square Gallery, VT Artsalon, Absolute Space for the Arts, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, and participated in group exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, TKG+, Chimei Museum, Pier2 Art Center, among others. Residencies he has taken part in include Cité Internationale des Arts, France and the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Program. Some of Liao’s large-scale installation works are collected by the White Rabbit Gallery, Australia, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts. He is currently residing and working at a studio in Bali Duchuantou, New Taipei City.

Tseng Jing-Wen is the director of “Wood with Branches” Theatre Studio and a regular performer at the Dr. Red Nose Association.
In 2007, she began engaging in the public participatory theater. Her practice revolves around the pedagogy of the oppressed and the theatre of the oppressed. Through bodily engagement and creative conversations in a theatrical setting, she explores topics related to oneself and public life with people.

In 2018, she became one of the first group of “Dr. Red Nose” performers in southern Taiwan and began training for a form of drama therapy known as “Developmental Transformations” (DvT). The improvisation and playfulness of theatrical clowning and the DvT model help her undergo a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, through which she is able to unveil a new horizon in a fluid and autonomous way.

Misako Ichimura has lived in a homeless community in a Tokyo park called the Blue Tent Village since 2003. Along with her co-resident, she launched Cafe Enoaru, a bartering space and art center, where people are able to gather and paint. Later, in 2007, Misako started another organization, the homeless feminist group Nora,with other homeless women. In 2010, with the help of local artists and social activists, she founded Artist-in-Residence (A.I.R.) Miyashita, which attempted to prevent NIKE from redeveloping the park. Since then, she has been engaged in efforts to resist privatization, gentrification, and art-washing that are behind the eviction of homeless people.

Actively involved in various projects including creating artwork, writing essays, and organizing workshops on themes such as feminism, capitalism, and anti-gentrification.

Yu Yen-Fang is an independent performer and dance instructor born in a Hakka household in Zhongli. Her practice has long focused on contemporary Taiwanese social issues by utilizing the body as a medium to internalize and project the stories and life experiences of the land, transforming profound understandings and feelings into artistic vocabularies. In 2013, Yu launched “Project MuoMuo,” a long-term training and creative collaboration with dancers, theater performers, and interdisciplinary design groups. The project aims to search for an effective language of performing arts to connect and communicate with Taiwanese audiences. In 2017, she launched the “MuoMuo Workshop” to promote improvised dance, and resumed the role of an independent artist. She has since appeared frequently in dances, theater productions, videos, and exhibitions, and has been active in both Taiwan and abroad.

Born in Taitung, Wu Yu-Hsuan has always been fascinated with the wilderness in nature and humanity. A prolific author, she has published nine poetry collections and essay anthologies, among which are Exchanging Lovers’ Ribs, Fields Burning After Dusk, Decaying Anywhere: 99 Love Letters from a Movie Fan, and The Forgetting of Form – Sketches from My Residency at Santa Fe. She has been selected as an artist-in-residence at various art institutions, including Santa Fe Art Institute, Jane St. Art Center in New York, La Porte Peinte in France, and Skaftfell Art Center in Iceland. She is currently studying for her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Like Rainer Maria Rilke, she hopes to restore the initial meanings of words and give the initial value of words back to things.

Val Lee is a director and visual artist, who founded Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel. Lee is active in the fields of visual and performing arts. Using ephemeral situations as a primary approach, Lee engages the audience in a system of live art comprising action scripts, installations, sounds, hypnotic rhetoric, composite structures, and mise-en-scène. Lee has been known for her dream-like performance method, her boundary-dissolving approaches, as well as her construction of political fables.

Li is a Taiwanese sound worker, electronic music composer, theater sound designer, DJ, and cultural activist. Li is the founder of “Midnight Sound Maker Studio,” promoting Taiwan electronic music and sound, redeeming and reclaiming human being’s auditory sense. Li’s works often take the form of field recording and mixing of the traditional and the electronic, creating a world of rich narrative sounds. In recent years, Li has run several sound projects: “Freeze Historical Reverberations: An Auditory Narratives of Caves in Taiwan”, “Psyche-Delics – The Ear of Psyloyibin: To Listen to Our Minds,” “Electronic Taiwan Folk Music,” and “Sounds Like Sound – Stone, S-Tone.” Li’s works are exhibited or practiced in the New Taipei City Art Museum, C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab, and various music festivals.
Portfolio website: http://www.litzi-mei.com/

Walking Grass Agriculture, founded in 2014, is an artist collective known for its visual arts, design, and curatorial works. The art group mainly comprises Chen Han-Sheng and Liu Hsing-Yu, who come from a background in new media art and art history. Their practice emphasizes residence experience and observation. Deeply interested in the learning, migration, and formation of folk arts, their work amalgamates ethnography, modernology, and the study of material culture, through which they transform conventional experiences of husbandry to mold and create their idiosyncratic approaches to art. In recent years, they have focused on topics related to eco-environment, urban changes, and gender issues. Walking Grass Agriculture has been featured in exhibitions at numerous art institutions, among which are the Centre Pompidou, Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco, Bangkok Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Tainan Art Museum, Chiayi Art Museum, and Kaohsiung’s Neiwei Arts Center.

Hong Jun-Yuan holds a Ph.D. in Art Creation and Theory from Tainan National University of the Arts. He is currently an assistant professor in the Bachelor Program in Taiwan Humanities and Creativity at National Chung Hsing University. His works have been shown in numerous places worldwide and featured in various film festivals and video arts festivals in Taiwan and abroad. His research interest lies in the developmental trajectory and archival construction of Taiwanese video art.

“I was not accepted into the art classes in elementary and junior high schools.

In 2002, I became quite put off by ‘the cumulative labor work visible in images being the only evaluation criterion for art awards.’
Filming my father’s spontaneous, wide range of creations in parks
(though he did not consider them art) became a turning point for me later (I was not aware of it at the time).

In graduate school, I realized that the friendship with/understanding of/breaking from peers formed the core of my art.
Such experiment was first presented in a group exhibition at SinPinkPier in 2010–the real beginning of group exhibitions and team fights.

After graduation, I avoid returning home, and later moved to Kaohsiung’s Dalinpu in 2012.

However, only after I returned home in 2016 did I realize how much those trivial, trench art-like handmade works matter to me.

Though it has not yet happened, I look forward to returning to Dalinpu to show if my ideas have progressed in these years and meeting those I might be working with in the future.”

——Artist Statement by Ni Xiang

Tsou Shin-Ning is a gatherer who wanders through forests, and she is also a reader and writer. A former magazine editor, Tsou is now a freelance writer who writes about both art and nature, as she also attempts to integrate the two. Her writing has been featured in various publications, including When We Believe in Trees, Encountering Tainan, Tainaner Ensemble since 1987, The Poet Who Plants Trees, and The Making of Cloud Gate. In recent years, her articles have been featured in online and offline media such as Initium Media, OKAPI, Foutain, Rhythms Monthly, and PAR Performing Arts Redefined. Her writings are also compiled on her website, “Singing Like Forest.”

Team of “A Letter to Daughter” comprises young creators recruited by artist Kao Jun-Honn. Members of the Team of “A Letter to Daughter” are:
Li Yu-Han, Li Yi-Xuan, Wu Wan-Jhen, Lin Shin-Heng, Lin Ruei-Ting, Lin Yu-Hsien, Lin Ting-Chen, Lin Jung-Cheng, Lin Ching-Ying, Fan Chen-Yu, Chang Yu-Ning, Chen Ping-Hsin, Chen Yun-Hsiang, Chen Yu-Chen, Chen Hsiao-Mei, Chen Guan-Yu, Yang Tzu-Yi, Yang Chun-An, Phoebe Liao Yu-Jing, Pan Lo-Chun, Pan Yu-Han, Liu Jia-Heng, Liu Kuei-Fen, Liu Lee-Jung, Jhong Yu-Lun, Sue Yu-Syuan

Born in 1973 in Taiwan, Kao Jun-Honn graduated in 1998 from the Taipei National University of the Arts with a BA in Fine Arts and obtained his Ph.D. in Art Creation and Theory in 2017 from the Tainan National University of the Arts. Kao specializes in project-based artworks and writing, and he examines complex socio-economic issues using his extensive fieldwork experience. Departing from a foundation of sociology and history, Kao uses video, corporality, writing, and other formats to explore issues related to indigenous peoples, spaces, memories, Kao is currently an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Art, National Kaohsiung Normal University, and he also directed a documentary on the Atayal tribe of Dabao.

Based on the concept of “art as play,” TransA PLAY by the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Art at the National Kaohsiung Normal University specializes in integrating topics of discussion into game designs, with the vibrant energy of games and play explored. The members of TransA PLAY are organically assembled according to the tasks and opportunities at hand, and the following members have contributed to this particular project: Tsai Pei-Kuei, Lin Cheng-Wei, Luo Jhao-Ting, Hua Tsz-Lu, Lin Jung-Cheng, Wang Champion, Lin Ting-Chen, Sue Yu-Syuan, Chen Yun-Hsiang, Liu Kuei-Fen, Lin Yu-Hsien, Chang Yu-Ning, Phoebe Liao Yu-Jing, Chen Guan-Yu, Yang Tzu-Yi, Li Yi-Xuan, Pan Lo-Chun, Lin Ruei-Ting, Lin Yueh-Chen, Lin Ching-Ying, Liu Lee-Jung, Pan Yu-Han, Lin Shin-Heng, Jian Wan-Ju, Lee Sun-Ju, Chen Yu-Chen, Wen Hsin, and Cheng Hsin-Hui. Built on a foundation of diversity and heterogeneity integrated from the various backgrounds of its members, TransA PLAY seeks to collectively create a learning playground through exchanges and stimulations. With knowledge integrated into the games, learning is facilitated through experiences of physical engagement and stress-free play, achieving a dialogic-based experience of learning as play and play as art.