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Becoming an Acronym: Taiwan at the 2026 Gwangju Biennale In the weeks leading up to the 16th Gwangju Biennale, scheduled to open in September 2026, a dispute emerged over the name under which Taiwan would appear in the Biennale’s Pavilion program. Taiwan’s participation, organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), had been proposed, contracted, and prepared under the name “Taiwan Pavilion” since earlier this year. The first unsettling sign surfaced in a gro

I have continued reading Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam (a book I mentioned in my previous post). What struck me about Kwon’s work was how completely and carefully it establishes the material significance of ghosts without asking the reader to “believe” in them. He brings in major theories, scholars, histories, ethnographic observations, and the concrete consequences of people’s relationships with the dead, until there is very little room left to dismiss ghosts as irr

In August 2025, less than a month after I had returned to Korea from the United States, I attended a Critical Island Studies conference held at Jeju National University, where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was scheduled to participate in a roundtable and give a keynote the following day. The conference had been overwhelmed by the prospect of Spivak’s presence well before she actually appeared. There was excitement, but also an extraordinary amount of pressure around the event. T

I recently read Kim Dong-ri’s Munyŏdo (무녀도 巫女圖), a short story first published in 1936, and almost immediately started wondering whether there was an English translation I could share. My first thought was fairly simple. I appreciated the work, and I wanted people who do not read Korean to be able to read it too. Part of what interested me was the way the story stages a conflict between Korean shamanism and Christianity. Religious conflict of this kind is hardly unusual in mo

This morning, I received a rejection from a leading journal in an established academic field. I had sent them one of the strangest and most ambitious essays I have written. It was also, in my mind, one of the most academic. Not because it followed disciplinary conventions particularly well, but because it was trying to ask a basic scholarly question: what happens when a body of knowledge that presents itself as universal is made visible as local? The essay placed a Korean dia

Among friends from East and Southeast Asian backgrounds, I have sometimes joked that what we need is a grand exorcism across Asia. The joke emerged from a strange familiarity. Friends from Korea, China, Taiwan diasporas would begin telling stories about their families, and somehow the stories kept arriving at the same emotional architecture: parents who had given everything, children who could never adequately repay them, love that arrived as sacrifice, sacrifice that became

“Academia is just like that.” “Everyone does it that way.” “It is the only path.” “You have not really worked in the real world. You do not understand reality.” I heard these sentences one after another in a recent conversation. What unsettled me was not simply that the other person disagreed with me. I had been asking why academics so often seem to repeat the same advice, almost as though they had agreed upon it in advance. Within seconds, however, the question changed. It w

Indigenous Knowledge, Non-Indigenous Authority, and the Academic “We” - Academia has been learning the same lesson since the advent of modernity: the world is larger, more alive, and less containable than its prevailing methods allow. Again and again, scholars announce that human beings are not sovereign subjects; that knowledge exceeds the human; that matter is lively; that animals, plants, land, ancestors, spirits, and other-than-human beings participate in worlds that cann

On partial truths, theoretical afterlives, and the noise of literature review Academic writing places an extraordinary burden on citation because it is trained to evaluate a writer’s capacity for placement before it evaluates the thought itself. Before an argument can be heard on its own terms, the writer must demonstrate that they know how authority is organized: which names must be invoked, which lineages acknowledged, which territorial boundaries respected, and which exist

On popular culture, interpretive generosity, and the accusation of “overreading” - I have recently become more aware of a persistent asymmetry in cultural criticism: many extraordinarily intelligent people become strangely intellectually careless around popular culture. I do not mean that they suddenly lose their analytical abilities - I mean almost the opposite: they become unusually confident. They approach literature, philosophy, history, and social life with seriousness,

In academia, certain questions seem to follow automatically whenever one writes about culture. Have you sufficiently considered the risk of appropriation? Have you overlooked asymmetries of power? Are you being too optimistic? Before speaking of connection and generativity, should you not first warn us more fully about the dangers such possibilities may contain? These are, of course, important questions. Cultural appropriation, Orientalism, and representational violence are r

I am waiting for your signal But how can I put the fire in my heart on hold? It's relentless It burns my breath It hurts my chest It fogs my mind It pushes me next to you and then I start dreaming of your smile your awkward stories your steadiness your body moving across the space your soft voice making jokes your eyes your eyes your silence your silenced breath that says “I recognize you” “there's a part in you that I recognize” I always hear that voice in you I am waiting f

On Meta-Interpretive Distance, Generative AI, and the Limits of Heteronormative Communication [Appendix to “On Listening as an Epistemic Condition: Transnational Bodies at the Limits of Interpretation — Notes from an Encounter with Frida”] This second appendix begins from a different pressure point than the first. If Appendix I names the violence of the imagined reader and the temporal structures that foreclose listening, this appendix turns toward method : how listening migh

[Appendix to “On Listening as an Epistemic Condition: Transnational Bodies at the Limits of Interpretation — Notes from an Encounter with Frida”] This appendix exists because even On Listening as an Epistemic Condition (currently under review and therefore not publicly shareable) was necessarily partial. That essay insists that the body cannot be cut out of knowledge production, that listening is an epistemic condition rather than a metaphor, and that certain encounters—such

From day one of my return to Korea after eight years of US stay - actually, starting from the on-flight accident that delayed the return - I've been devastated. Every day was survival, and after five months of dealing with the sense of insecurity, I finally reached the bottom of it all. What follows is AI-generated narration from a moment of clarity that I landed on. I would have made this into an article, simply because I have enough references to make this look "academic en

Minu Park( minupark0@gmail.com ) and Chee-Hann Wu ( cheehann.wu@gmail.com ) Preface: Why This Journal Exists This journal began as a necessity. The piece you are about to read—co-written across Korea and Taiwan, across performance and media—was told it did not quite belong. More precisely: an editor at an online platform (on media, performance, and popular culture) imagined a different home for it than the one we carried in mind. We revised in good faith, clarifying our argum

I keep the brackets for Asian because I genuinely don’t know what to call the place I’m speaking from. It’s not quite ethnic, not exactly diasporic, not simply cultural. It’s the accumulation of moving between worlds and holding more than one at the same time. What people call double consciousness but which, in my body, feels more like an expanded perceptual field than anything pathological or lacking. What I keep returning to is how this double consciousness becomes unspea

The jungle is never quiet When the wind moves, the leaves tense first When a bird takes flight, the air remembers its direction They have lived there for a long time always alert, always listening their body reacting before thought arrives One day, a stone flew from somewhere In the instant it touched the ground their body remembered old lessons: What did I do wrong this time? This time, something shifted. They looked down and noticed there was no blood, only the echo of anot

Scene from Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) ( https://nrecclessmith.com/2013/04/25/when-you-lose-your-ability-to-fly/ ) MAGIC IS WHAT CANNOT BE CONTAINED You cannot "obtain" magic You cannot "lose" magic Magic is what you already have Magic is what is already in you drawing by Fei Yuan