Not Just Love Stories
Website: https://notjustlovestories.collective.tw
Facebook: Link
Time: 2020-present
Place: Various locations across Taiwan
Role: Initiator, Co-curator
Team:
Co-curator｜Sally Sung, Sherry Chang, Fiona Hsu
Project Advisor｜Kao Jen-Hsiang, Huang Te-Hsuan
Executive Producer｜Chien Tzu-Han
Artists｜Aris, Chandra, Toni, Jhodyn, Pahrudin, Evi Agustika, Tari Sasha, Liu Chun-liang, Wu Mei-chi, Lin Hsin-hui, Yang Shuang-zi, Jen Pei Cheng, Xiao Jun-yi, Lai Wei-yu, Wei Ze
"Not Just Love Stories" is an artistic co-creation project that explores the concepts of affectivity and mobility, a work that is initiated and curated by artistic and literary composers with the participation of the community of Southeast Asian immigrants in Taiwan. The plan has rolled into motion since 2020 and is still in progress.
Based on the themes of feelings and emotions, the Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan are the main subjects of the participatory project "Not Just Love Stories" as well as the co-creation partners. It intends to explore the collaboration and skill exchanges between the different communities and to ponder further development with more creative interactions and alternative knowledge production modes in the existing migrant worker issues in Taiwan. Since 2020, having research and co-creations as the cores, the journey of"Not Just Love Stories" departed from the study of documentation and interviews, followed by field and participatory research of the migrant communities and living fields in 2021; then, cross-field migrant workers and Taiwanese creators from the literary and visual art fields joined in, and the project was further developed as a co-created experiment. In 2022 which was the third year of the project, it was developed into more comprehensive creations, research, and activities.
In 2022, the project was developed into three dimensions:
- Artist-in-residency: The team stationed in Jinwanwan Department Store( an important living area of the Phillipino Communities in Taipei) located in Zhongshan N. Rd, Taipei, where it began its field research and artistic activity planning as well as interaction and story collection from the Philippine community based on the theme of "love".
- Literary co-writing: As a continuation of the co-writing in 2021, Taiwanese and Indonesian writers were invited to continue the stories with the theme of love. The Indonesian migrant photographer community was invited to conduct an experimental interpretation of the work.
- Artistic creation studies: Visual artists Cheng Jen-pei and Wei Ze were invited to conduct creation studies based on the themes of intercultural marriage and unregistered babies.
The theme of mobility is still the focus of this project in 2022 and refers to the care and comprehension derived from the migrant communities, which are the subject matter; inspirations are also extracted from the literary genre "romance" so that the common "formula" of feelings and emotions are used as the exploration path for the project layout. In terms of the website content, it is a creative enlightenment derived and refracted from the inspirations of the literature which lead to the website construction concepts of "editing" and "writing"; the entire course of changes and creations are accumulated and turned into interfaces of texts and images, which shall be the foundation of dynamic archives, records and creative development showcased in the physical exhibition in 2023.
"Not Just Love Stories" is a project that I initiated and co-curated with Sally Sung and Sherry Chang, under SEA plateaus, a cultural exchange initiative under the Cultural Taiwan Foundation, commissioned by The Cultural Ministry of Taiwan.