Cheng Wen-Chi: 12 Years of Pushing Taiwan's Art World into the Malay Archipelago

30-second overview: Cheng Wen-Chi is the editor-in-chief of No Man's Land, a Taiwan-based contemporary art criticism platform. From its founding in 2011 to the present — 12 years — it has accumulated 56 issues and 384 articles. His real work lies in replacing "Southeast Asia" with "archipelago" as a framework — in 2017 he launched the Nusantara Archive project, inviting artists from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore to undertake residencies in Taiwan, using nusantara (the Malay word for "archipelago"), a pre-national concept, to give Taiwan's art world a geographic coordinate independent of both the "Chinese" and "Western" axes. But 12 years on, article output has shrunk (from a 2016 peak of 49 articles/year to just 5 in 2023), and a single-editor perspective combined with platform aging has meant the periphery has hit its own ceiling.

The Afternoon Okui Lala Arrived in Taipei

In May 2017, Malaysian artist Okui Lala arrived in Taipei as the first invited artist under the No Man's Land residency and Nusantara Archive program¹. At her end-of-residency presentation, she screened a video — in it, she and her mother-in-law repeat the same set of Teochew phrases over and over: "Peace for the whole family, peace for the grandchildren, safety in all encounters, may we meet good people"².

That was footage from her 2016 work How do we meet? How can we meet?, recorded in Thailand. She and her mother-in-law repeat the same blessings in different languages, turning "how do people who speak different languages meet?" into a visual installation.

The curator did not stand at center stage that afternoon.

This presentation was a significant moment for an art criticism platform with no government backing, one that had started purely as online writing. Its founder, Cheng Wen-Chi (Tenn, Bun-ki), had launched No Man's Land in November 2011³, and it took six years before he issued his first cross-border residency invitation. The name "Nusantara Archive" would later become the first instance of anyone in Taiwan's art world using the Malay word nusantara — rather than "Southeast Asia" — as a geographic frame.

Readers would later encounter the editorial note he wrote for the Hermeneutics of Nusantara feature — a self-description distilled over six years into a single passage:

"Although 'Nusantara' is a formulation composed of nusa (island) and antara (other) centered on medieval Java, and although a 'pre-international' tendency already existed among the Malay-speaking archipelago, when it refers to a regional archive that includes Taiwan, it can be said to embody a 'meta' textual vision akin to that of No Man's Land."⁴

The sentence is somewhat convoluted. But it took a curator six years to be able to articulate it.

An Online Writing Project That Began in 2011

No Man's Land was born in November 2011. At the time, the Digital Art Foundation (DAF, founded by Huang Wen-Hao and others) sponsored this "online writing project," and Cheng Wen-Chi has served as editor-in-chief from the very first issue⁵.

The platform's self-description has not changed in 12 years — operating in the peripheral zones of contemporary art, technology, performance, narrative, and imagination, using the creative interconnection and circulation of "the internet, text, and community" as its methodology⁶.

These keywords deserve unpacking: "periphery" is a geographic choice (not standing alongside mainstream curating); "internet" is a medium choice (no print edition, entirely WordPress); "text" is a practice choice (writing, not mounting exhibitions); "community" is an extension choice (residencies, talks, small publications).

As of issue 56 in 2024 (the Hiroshima atomic bomb-themed "Pikakku!"), No Man's Land has accumulated 56 themed issues, 384 articles, 31 podcast episodes, and 10 independently published volumes of the Nusantara Archive⁷. Each issue averages 7 articles, with Cheng Wen-Chi personally editing 88% (310 out of 353 articles)⁸.

📝 Curator's Note
An 88% editorial concentration is a double-edged sword. On one side, 12 years have produced an exceptionally consistent depth of discourse — the four frameworks of archipelago/periphery/decolonization/Pacific Rim function as stable basis vectors. On the other side is the ceiling of a single perspective: younger female curators' voices are underrepresented, Indigenous topics are largely absent, and new themes have declined after 2023. When a platform's editorial philosophy comes entirely from one person, its maturity matures in sync with that person — but so does its fatigue.

Why a _Contributing Writer for Artouch_ Launched a New Platform

Cheng Wen-Chi did not begin writing criticism in 2011. Starting in 2007, he wrote criticism and translated foreign discourse for print magazines including Artouch, Artist Magazine, and Artitude⁹, and served as Chinese-language editor for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts' "Taiwan Digital Art Knowledge and Creative Exchange Platform." In other words, when he launched No Man's Land in 2011, he had already been established in the mainstream for four years.

This timing matters. A person who had already secured a foothold in the mainstream for four years chose to leave mainstream structures to write what the mainstream could not — a fundamentally different position from that of a peripheral writer looking for an outlet.

What could the mainstream not write? In 2011, the discursive landscape of Taiwan's art world largely revolved around two coordinates: the Western (the contemporary art mainstream of New York, Berlin, Paris) and the Chinese (cross-strait art exchange, the rise of Chinese contemporary art). Southeast Asia as a subject existed only in the "local connection" sections of a handful of exhibitions — artists from Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines were virtually invisible in Taiwanese art discourse.

Cheng Wen-Chi's own path diverged from this mainstream. In 2014, he co-initiated Project Glocal Asian City Streaming with Filipino curator Dayang Yraola¹⁰, inviting artists from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia to undertake month-long residencies in Taiwan. In 2015, he co-curated the "Today in History" unit of the DA+C Art Festival in Malaysia¹¹. From 2016 to 2017, he served as a long-term observer for Baan Noorg's "365 Days: LIFE MUSE" in Thailand.

By the time he launched the Nusantara Archive in 2017, he had already accumulated three years of curatorial practice along the Taiwan–Southeast Asia axis.

Why Replace "Southeast Asia" with "Archipelago"

"Southeast Asia" is a term born of Cold War American geostrategy — in 1943, the Allied forces established the South East Asia Command (SEAC), and the label was carried forward as a regional designation after the war. In other words, "Southeast Asia" is a word for viewing this geography from the outside.

"Nusantara" (Malay for "archipelago") is the name the local language uses for this geography on its own terms. In medieval Javanese texts, nusa means "island," antara means "other," and together they mean "between islands" — no single island is the center; every island is the "other" of some other island.

Cheng Wen-Chi's choice of nusantara as a framework reflects a deeper perspective choice: replacing an external colonial-era name with the self-designation in the local language, and replacing the "center–periphery" binary with a "continuum between islands." For Taiwan's art world, the significance of this shift lies in — Taiwan can be understood as the northeastern extremity of the Malay Archipelago, stepping outside both the existing positioning as "Southeast Asia's other" and "an island adrift from the Chinese world."

The first phase of the Nusantara Archive (2017–2019) received a grant of NT$350,000 from the National Culture and Arts Foundation¹². The first year (May 2017 to April 2018) invited Malaysian artists Okui Lala and Hoo Fan Chon each for a one-month research residency in Taiwan⁴. The entire program emphasized long-term, embedded two-way exchange rather than one-off shipping of artworks for exhibition, with artists producing documents, images, and proposals during their residencies. The first year's results were compiled into NML Issue 34, Hermeneutics of Nusantara, in September 2017 — the first formal discursive articulation of this framework.

The second phase, Twinning Archipelago, launched in 2021 with a grant of NT$400,000 from the National Culture and Arts Foundation¹³. This iteration focused on "between two archipelagos" — Taiwan as one archipelago, Malay Indonesia as the other, with both sides interpreting each other's historical experiences.

By 2024, the Nusantara Archive had published 10 independent volumes containing over 40 bilingual Chinese-English texts¹⁴. For a program with no commercial model, sustained by NGO grants and institutional partnerships, this is an extraordinarily rare accumulation.

The Shadow of a Transnational Curatorial Network

The No Man's Land ABOUT page lists a 7-member editorial advisory committee — Huang Wen-Hao (DAF founder / ET@T), Au Sow-Yee (Malaysian contemporary artist / film curator), YAP Sau Bin (Malaysian curator / biennial practitioner), Takamori Nobuo (Taiwanese curator / 2021 Asian Art Biennial curator), Lo Shih-Tung (Taiwanese curator / Global South art communities), Wu Ting-Kuan (Cheng Wen-Chi's long-term guest editor), and Huang Ching-Ying¹⁵.

This list is effectively a directory of a transnational curatorial network. Four from Taiwan (Huang Wen-Hao / Takamori Nobuo / Lo Shih-Tung / Huang Ching-Ying + Wu Ting-Kuan) + two from Malaysia (Au Sow-Yee / YAP Sau Bin) + one hands-on editor. It is not a "who's who of the art world" — it is a list of people who have actually co-curated, co-published, and co-hosted residencies together.

The concrete instantiations of this network extend beyond NML: when Takamori Nobuo curated the 2021 Asian Art Biennial, he was in dialogue with Cheng Wen-Chi's archipelago framework; Au Sow-Yee's work Melbourne International Film Festival series was discussed multiple times in NML and was the subject of an interview¹⁶; the 2018 "Border Travel PETAMU Project" was initiated by Open-Contemporary Art Centre and co-curated by Cheng Wen-Chi and Lo Shih-Tung.

In other words, the relationships among these seven people exceed the formal definition of an NML advisory board. They are a small ecosystem that has, over 12 years, invited, co-curated, and written criticism for one another across Taiwan and Malay Indonesia. NML is the writing platform of this ecosystem, but the ecosystem itself is something larger.

Piracy, Radio Waves, and Bubbles

If 2017–2020 was the "archipelago period," then 2021–2022 was the "Pacific Rim period."

In 2022, Cheng Wen-Chi personally curated the issue The Piracy, the Radiowave, the Bubble, proposing three conceptual frameworks: "piracy," "radio waves," and "bubbles" as "three unconventional scenarios we have observed traversing modern nation-state boundaries across the Pacific Rim geopolitical surface from the World Wars to the New Cold War"¹⁷.

"Piracy" is cross-border illicit flow — of people, goods, information, genes.
"Radio waves" refer to the special role of wireless in the Asian Cold War — Cheng Wen-Chi himself wrote: "The local history of 'radio waves' originates from the late 1930s, when the Japanese Empire used broadcast wireless to promote the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to Nanshi (South China) and Nanyang (Southeast Asia) during its rule over Taiwan, making Taiwan the southernmost base for the Empire's broadcasting operations"¹⁸.
"Bubbles" are the digital capitalism bubbles of the New Cold War era — Facebook, streaming platforms, NFTs, the metaverse.

These three frameworks form a continuum from historical geopolitics (Japanese imperial broadcasting) to the contemporary digital (NFT bubbles). During the same period, NML also launched the "Nanyang Broadcasting Station" podcast series — 31 episodes in mixed Chinese and English, exploring wireless radio as a channel between Taiwan and Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The podcast extended the framework from text into sound objects — the Nusantara Archive expanded from document translation to historical soundscape reconstruction.

This was a peak of discursive accumulation. But it was also a signal of a turning point.

Contraction: After the Big Themes Were Exhausted

From 2023 onward, No Man's Land's article output declined sharply. From a 2016 peak of 49 articles per year and 41 articles in 2017 when the archipelago project launched, the count fell to 21 articles in 2022 and only 5 in 2023¹⁹.

This curve can be read from two angles.

Optimistic reading: The platform has entered a "settlement period" — the decline in articles reflects a shift in energy toward book publishing (10 volumes of the Nusantara Archive imprint), podcast production, and cross-organizational curating (Web3 collaborations with akaSwap, Volume DAO, and others). Cheng Wen-Chi himself began serving as a nominating observer for the Taishin Arts Awards (2018–2019, 2023), bringing NML's accumulated discourse into mainstream curatorial jurying.

Pessimistic reading: A 12-year, single-editor-driven platform has hit a structural ceiling — no successor, no mobile interface, Web 1.0 design, younger generations do not read long-form WordPress essays. Once the big theme (the archipelago) has been fully articulated, the platform ages along with it.

Both readings hold. They are two cross-sections of the same reality.

✦ Cheng Wen-Chi voluntarily placed himself on the periphery for 12 years, and this choice allowed him to see what Taiwan's art world could not — but the peripheral perspective also has its own blind spots: once the big theme has been fully articulated, the platform ages along with it.

The 2023 Volume DAO Talk

On May 14, 2023, at the exhibition "Taipei Living Room: Island Hash 2023" organized by Volume DAO, Cheng Wen-Chi co-presented a talk titled "Art Communities and the Global South" with Lo Shih-Tung²⁰. This was an NFT / on-chain community exhibition — a completely different domain from the "Malay Archipelago residency" discourse he had spent 12 years writing about.

But the subtitle of the talk was "Understanding the 'Global South' through Historical Geography and On-Chain Communities." Cheng Wen-Chi extended the "South" framework from Malay Archipelago geopolitics to on-chain communities — suggesting his own next step in thinking about the "archipelago" framework.

This turn is not necessarily a continuation; it may be another shape of the periphery. When the geographically-defined "South" discourse hit its ceiling, he attempted to redefine what "the South" means on the blockchain. Are Web3 on-chain communities another form of "archipelago" — decentralized, interconnected, replacing centralized narratives with tokenized historical memory?

Twelve years ago he wrote criticism for Artouch; in 2017 he launched the Nusantara Archive; in 2023 he sat on the Volume DAO stage explaining "the South" to a room full of people who understand NFTs. NML's article count will continue to shrink, but 56 issues, 384+ articles, 10 volumes of the Nusantara Archive, and 40+ bilingual texts will not age.

A peripheral platform's 12-year accumulation matters more than whether it stays "alive."

Further Reading

• Taiwanese Curators and Cultural Construction — The discursive development and visualization trends of the generation of Taiwanese curators including Takamori Nobuo (NML editorial advisor)
• Taiwan New Media Art — Forty years of digital art history from Yuan Goang-Ming's video works to VR and generative art; Cheng Wen-Chi's critical trajectory runs parallel to this main thread
• Taiwan Soundscape — Sound artists including Wang Fu-Jui, Yao Chung-Han, and Chang Yung-Da, most of whose works have been deeply reviewed in No Man's Land's Sound Scene category
• Contemporary Art — An overview layer of Taiwan's contemporary art ecosystem as a whole; adding Cheng Wen-Chi's archipelago framework reveals the complete discursive map
• Taiwan Indigenous Contemporary Art — A field NML has touched on less; reading it alongside the "Austronesian homeland hypothesis" reveals potential intersections with the archipelago framework

References