Arts and Culture

See More Short Films!: New Voices in Taiwanese Short Film at the Women Make Waves International Film Festival

Michelle Chow
Last month, Taipei’s SPOT-Huashan theater was home to the Women Make Waves International Film Festival. First held in 1993, the Women Make Waves festival has now completed its 31st edition–about the same age as Lumi. Over the course of ten days, the festival showed more than a hundred screenings, organized by the Taiwan Women’s Film Association around the theme of “Spacing.” Interpreted by the festival’s chairperson Joyce Tang as 缝隙 (gap, or fissure), this theme was explored with breadth and nuance through the curatorial team’s selection of films, which sounded the complex terrains of war, work, sex, gender, and national identity...
Arts and CultureEnglishFilm and TelevisionNovember 202411 min read

A Snapshot on Public Art: An Interview with Cal Y Canto Dance Group

Peiyi Yu
The young audience exclaimed when the dancers of Cal Y Canto dance group wheeled a giant goldfish kite to swoop over them, aghast with wonder. Cal Y Canto‘s performances at the New Taipei City Children’s Art Festival had created a following for themselves. Their performances between July 14 to July 20 at the Children’s Art Festival regularly gathered a crowd of youthful audience every night at 8:30pm. The dancers saw their free for all performances for children as a way to “recover the public space"...
Arts and CultureEnglishJuly 2024Performance4 min read

Nymphia Wind’s RuPaul’s Drag Race Win: Rekindling Exotification or Alternative Empowerment?

Ziggy Zhu
As the judge announced, "America's next drag superstar is - Nymphia Wind!", the room of filled with anticipation and excitement. Nymphia, wearing her iconic all-yellow outfit and high ponytail, covered her face and kneeled down dramatically, overwhelmed by her victory. Born in the United State and raised in Taiwan, Nymphia, otherwise known as Leo Tsao, developed a passion for making clothes and dressing up as a teenager. She transformed her teenage enthusiasm into a thriving career and made history for queer people in Asia by becoming the first drag queen of East Asian heritage to win RuPaul's Drag Race. Her victory sparked discussions about Taiwanese drag culture, LGBTQ+ rights, and Asian representation across the globe. This article explores how Nymphia evokes the exoticized fascination of Asia in the Global North through her performances and recodes this fascination into tools that empower queer people in Asia...
Arts and CultureEnglishMay 2024Performance6 min read

Calling For a Return to Sinocentrism in the Name of Opposing It: Responding to ‘Reconsidering Sinophone Studies’

Brian Hioe
The International Journal of Taiwan Studies, one of the flagship journals of the discipline, published an unusual piece several months ago by Flair Donglai Shi. Though framed as an attack on Shih Shu-mei’s concept of the Sinophone, the crux of the piece’s argument is effectively that Taiwan studies is insufficiently Sinocentric...
Arts and CultureEnglishJuly 2021Literature and Poetry8 min read