Born in Tainan, Taiwan, 1984.
Currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan.
Chen Ching-Yuan received his M.F.A. in 2013 from the School of Fine Arts of the Taipei National University of the Arts. In recent years, Chen Ching-Yuan attempts to capture through his painting the subtle sensibility that weaves through literature, mythology, and history in different cultural contexts. The artist's unique compositions coalesce into a constellation of images where the absence of the temporal element and the fragmentation of meaning elicit unexpected narrative parallels between the artist's imaginary worlds and the essence of humanity.
Poet, author, mixed-media performance artist, and activist Brad Walrond is one of the foremost writers of the 1990s Black Arts Movement centered in Brooklyn, New York City. Brad’s work focuses on development of human consciousness by exploring the prisms of race, desire, identity, sacred practice, and science.
Brad’s poetry is published in the New York Times, African Voices, Moko Magazine, and Eleven Eleven. Brad received his BA in Political Science from the City College of New York; MA in Political Science from Columbia University. His first collection of prose and poems Everywhere Alien will be published on Moore Black Press.
Chien Li-Ying is a Taiwanese playwright and director. She was born in Yuanlin, Changhua in 1984. Li-Ying received her BA degree in Theatre Arts from Chinese Culture University and majored in MFA Playwriting at Taipei National University of the Arts.
Chien Li-Ying was selected as one of the Top 10 Promising Theatre Artists by Performing Arts Review magazine in 2011, she was also awarded Outstanding Theatre Artist by the same magazine in 2012. In 2015, Li-Ying was the Resident Artist of National Theater & Concert Hall.
Born in Taichung in 1986, Chuang Chih-Wei has a mixed background of art and architecture. He is expert at creating sites and interactive devices by using light and space to explore the relationship between people and the environment. He keeps pursuing cross-domain blending in his creation process to present artistic aesthetic with both rationality and sensibility.
Elena Redaelli is a researcher and a nomadic creator. In her projects she explores matter, transformation, processes of generation and decay involving different levels of control and challenging the boundaries of authorship and active intervention. Sometimes the material takes the lead, other times the participants or the environment itself, resulting in a constant process of transformation, improvisation and exchange. The act of art making is an interrogative process within a new environment and her personal way to get closer to new cultures and people.
Taiwan HivStory Association is organized by people infected with HIV. They have collected articles about AIDS in Taiwan and attempted to build a new way of communication with the society by creating different works. They believe that AIDS is not only a public health issue, but also an issue related to law, politics, and human rights.
Jessica Whitbread (1980) is an artist and activist based in Canada/Kyrgyzstan. She works in the realm of social practice and community art, merging art and activism to engage a diversity of audiences in critical dialogue. Her ongoing projects include LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN (2012), Tea Time (2012), No Pants No Problem (2004) and is a cocurator of PosterVirus (2011); her work has been activated in over 40 different countries and shown in Canada, US, Australia, Norway and The Netherlands. In 2014, Jessica published Tea Time: Mapping Informal Networks of Women Living with HIV a photo collection of her community arts practice.
J Triangular is an independent curator, queer poet, experimental filmmaker/DIY video artist, and analog photographer, making art projects that speak about resistance, gender dynamics and memory landscapes. Her work often consists of poetic portraits of the unresolved social violences of history, and the rupture of identity in a culture of manufactured fear and legally institutionalized discrimination. Her work consistently addresses themes including counterculture and music, queer community identity and self-empowerment, radical forms of queer memory and resistance, social transformation, art and collective action with the use of accessible technologies, camcorder activism, promoting communication and links of solidarity.
Kairon Liu is a visual artist and an independent curator. His creation and research reflect the belief observed in daily life. He studies the meaning and symbol of particular objects to topic of research and turns it into visual symbols in his work, which brings out discussion of social issues such as, religious beliefs, contagious diseases, and collective values. He is accustomed to conducting projects from the perspective of a facilitator. He establishes links by in-depth interviews and collaborative creation methods.
Lee Tzu-Tung is a Taiwanese artist and director; her works concern gender, politics, indigenous people, White Terror, and national identification issues. She won awards such as Experimental Film Funds from NCAF and New Society Artists Scholarship from SAIC. She often uses new media to create her participatory art project.
Luo Jr-shin (born 1984, Taiwan) graduated from Taipei National University of Arts in 2010. His practice revolves around the experimentation of a variety of traditional and unconventional materials. Ranging from clay, resin, digital printing, everyday objects, to food, chemicals, and scent, this host of substances are vehicles through which Luo investigates the underlying spirituality and human condition in our representational world.
The beloved is I walk towards the glorious sun against the light.
Marguerite Van Cook (British, b.1954) is known for her multidisciplinary practice, which uses a wide variety of mediums that includes film (video), installation, theater, poetry, dance, comics and music. Van Cook moved to New York after her punk band The Innocents toured with The Clash (1978) and opened the seminal East Village gallery Ground Zero (1983-2001). She later collaborated with James Romberger on the art for“7 Miles a Second,” the late AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s graphic memoir. In 2007, she became Executive Director of the Howl! Festival and worked to establish HOWL! HELP, a free health service for artists. She is an advocate for the GLBTQI community and people living with HIV/AIDS everywhere.
Van Cook holds a B.A. and M.A. in Modern European Studies from Columbia University and a M.Phil. in French from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Van Cook is an adjunct professor at Hunter College, CUNY.
Taiwan Lourdes Association has been caring and serving individuals and families affected by HIV for 20 years. Regardless of their background, sex orientation, gender, or ethnic group, the association is committed to enhance their life quality, humanity, dignity, and value by consultations with professional social workers, proper supports, and mutual assistance services. It is dedicated to inspire passion of life and power to put dreams into actions. The association adheres to the beliefs and values mentioned above and developed five service guiding principles, including embracing difference, caring with sympathy, gaining empowerment, pursuing justice, fearless to challenges.
Sean Cheng graduated from Institute of Computer Science and Engineering of National Chiao Tung University. After taking classes in the Institute of Applied Art, he became interested in new media art and is expert at utilizing new media with programming to create new experience. For this exhibition, he collaborates with Taiwan Lourdes Association and creates a new body of work.
As an artist and filmmaker, Shu Lea Cheang has worked with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature length film and mobile web serial. As a net art pioneer, her Brandon (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She has been crafting her own film genre of new queer cinema, calling them ecocybenoia (Fresh Kill, 1994), scifi cyberpunk (I.K U, 2000), scifi cyphepunk (FluidØ, 2017).
Screenwriter and playwright based in Taiwan. Supported by Asian Cultural Council’s 2018 fellowship program, he participated in the New York artist-in-residence program for cultural exchange and artistic experimentation. He published two e-books, Self Re-Quests and Touching My Mind. His theater works include Self Re-Quest, Homeless, Women in the Rain, Touching My Mind, Borrowed Family, White Storyteller, and Homecoming. He has several TV shows produced, including Boys can Fly, Spring Beauty, Baby Daddy, House of Toy Bricks, Close Your Eyes before It’s Dark, A Boy Named Flora A, and Bardo, the first Netflix’s Asia original show. He also has written a feature, Back to the Good Times.Boys can Fly won 49th Golden Bell Awards for the best screenplay.