Performance

Robert Ashley is widely considered one of the great American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley created radical new forms of opera, incorporating electronic music and pioneering the use of opera in television. His multimedia projects expanded upon the form in surprising, often perplexing ways. Kurt Gottschalk spoke to Ashley in 2013 for a major feature in the 13th issue of White Fungus. At the time, Ashley was working on his opera Quicksand, which he completed before his passing in March 2014. The article can now be read online.

Yao Jui-Chung is one of Taiwan’s most prolific and esteemed contemporary artists. In 2020, White Fungus editor Ron Hanson interviewed Yao for a major profile on the occasion of the artist’s mid-career retrospective, Republic of Cynic, at C-LAB in Taipei. The feature was to be published in a new online Japanese art magazine commissioned by a Tokyo art collector. After the project was aborted due to a clash over the publication’s title, this profile sat dormant in our archives for almost four years. It has now been published for the first time.

In the space of only a few years, Taipei Popcorn, the creation of New Zealander Nick van Halderen, has emerged as one of Taiwan’s most iconic drag queens. Whether performing at underground clubs, doing photo shoots for Vogue, or starring in art films, Popcorn has become an omnipresent and pivotal figure in the island’s vibrant queer culture. Yet surprisingly, prior to relocating to Taiwan, Van Halderen had never ventured into the world of drag. White Fungus editor Ron Hanson spoke with Popcorn about their unusual journey and gained a window into their personal transformation and Taiwan’s surging queer scene.

Taipei-based artist Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) creates work dealing with the impact of colonization on the First Nations Atayal people of Taiwan while exploring the possibilities within her Indigenous culture for activating a queer space. In Lin's recent artworks, she seeks to recreate the spirit of Temahahoi, a place, according to Atayal oral stories, where a self-governed community of women resided independent of men.

Betty Apple is a musician and performance artist based in Taipei. Apple engages in what she terms "live art", intensely physical performances that deconstruct tightly composed constructions of corporeal and aural space. Advancing concepts of the feminine, Apple reworks the leftover rickety architecture of Taiwan's former military state while exploring new postcolonial subjectivities in its present reality, democracy saturated in hypercapitalism. Kyra Kordoski wrote about Apple's work for White Fungus.

Lin Chi-Wei is a key member of the pioneering generation of Taiwanese noise/sound artists that emerged in the 1990s. Lin has made landmark contributions as a writer, performer, artist, and member of Z.S.L.O (Zero Sound Liberation Organization). In Lin’s Tape Work, the artist sits in the center of the audience and unfurls a tape of ribbon or paper upon which characters are hand-printed or embroidered. Passed hand to hand through the crowd, each audience member/participant vocalizes the succession of phonetic symbols. The result is the creation of a multi-headed human tape machine. In the Taiwanese-language version of the work, Lin reactivates the “killing tone” or (Rù tone 入聲) from the medieval Chinese seven-tone system.