Chun Wen-chi: 12 Years of Pushing Taiwan's Art Scene into the Malay Archipelago

30-Second Overview: Chun Wen-chi (鄭文琦) is the editor-in-chief of the Taiwanese contemporary art criticism platform No Man's Land (數位荒原). Since its founding in 201．011, he has accumulated 56 issues and 384 articles over 12 years. His true work lies in using "archipelago" as a framework to replace "Southeast Asia"—launching the "Nusantara Archive" (群島資料庫) project in 2017, inviting artists from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore to residencies in Taiwan. Using the pre-national concept of nusantara (the Malay word for "archipelago"), he provides the Taiwanese art scene with a geographic coordinate independent of both "China" and "the West." However, after 12 years, article production has shrunk (from a peak of 49 articles/year in 2016 to just 5 in 2023), and a single editorial perspective combined with platform aging has caused the periphery to hit its own ceiling.

The Afternoon Okui Lala Arrived in Taiwan

In May 2017, Malaysian artist Okui Lala (周盈貞) arrived in Taipei as the first invited artist for the No Man's Land residency and the Nusantara Archive project¹. At the presentation marking the end of her residency, she played a video—in which she and her mother-in-law repeatedly recited a set of Teochew blessings: "Peace to the whole family, peace to descendants, peace in coming and going, may you meet good people"².

The work was recorded in Thailand in 2016, titled How do we meet? How can we meet?. By repeating the same blessings in different languages, she transformed "how people of different languages meet" into a visual installation.

That afternoon, the curator did not stand at the center of the stage.

For an art criticism platform that began as purely online writing without the aura of public institutions, this presentation was a milestone. Founder Chun Wen-chi (Tenn, Bun-ki) began publishing No Man's Land in November 2011³, and it took six years before he issued his first international residency invitation in 2017. The name "Nusantara Archive" later became the first instance in the Taiwanese art scene where the Malay term nusantara (archipelago) was used to replace "Southeast Asia" as a geographic framing.

Readers can later find his editorial notes in his self-curated Hermeneutics of Nusantara feature—a self-description distilled from six years of work:

"While 'Archipelago' is a scheme composed of the medieval Javanese concept of nusa (island) and antara (others), and since there was already a 'pre-international' tendency among the Malay Archipelago where Malay served as the lingua franca, when referring to a regional archive that includes Taiwan, it can be said to embody a 'meta' textual vision akin to 'No Man's Land'."⁴

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

An Online Writing Project Started in 2011

No Man's Land was born in November 2011. At the time, the Digital Arts Foundation (DAF, established by Huang Wen-hao and others) sponsored this "online writing project," with Chun Wen-chi serving as editor-in．chief from the very first issue⁵.

The platform's self-introduction has remained unchanged for 12 years: operating in the periphery of contemporary art, technology, performance, narrative, and imagination, using the creative connection and circulation of "network, text, and community" as its practice⁶.

These keywords are worth unpacking: "Periphery" is a geographic choice (not standing on the edge of mainstream curation); "Network" is a medium choice (no print, entirely WordPress); "Text" is an action choice (writing, rather than organizing exhibitions); "Community" is an extension choice (residencies, symposiums, publishing booklets).

As of the 56th issue (〈Caring for the Everyday〉) in March 2023, 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 seven articles, with Chun Wen-chi personally editing 88% (310 / 353 articles)⁸.

📝 Curator's Note
An 88% editorial concentration is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has built an extremely consistent depth of discourse over 12 years—the four frameworks of Archipelago/Periphery/Decolonization/Pacific are as stable as base vectors. On the/other hand, there is the ceiling of a single perspective: voices from the younger generation of female curators are sparse, Indigenous issues are largely absent, and new themes have decreased since 2023. When a platform's editorial philosophy stems entirely from one person, its period of maturity and its period of fatigue will move in sync.

Why an ArtTalks Contributor Started a New Platform

Chun Wen-chi did not start writing criticism in 2011. Since 2007, he has written reviews and translated international discourses for print media such as ArtTalks (今藝術), Artist (藝術家), and Art Outside (藝外)⁹, and previously served as the Chinese editor-in-chief for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts' "Taiwan Digital Art Knowledge and Creation Circulation Platform." In other words, when he launched No Man's Land in 2011, he had already established himself in the mainstream for four years.

This timing is significant. A person who has already stabilized within the mainstream chooses to leave that structure to write about things the mainstream cannot—a situation entirely different from a peripheral writer seeking an outlet.

What can the mainstream not write? In the discourse landscape of the Taiwan art scene in 2011, contemporary art discussions revolved around two coordinates: the West (the contemporary art mainstream of New York, Berlin, and Paris) and China (cross-Strait artistic exchange and the rise of Chinese contemporary art). Southeast Asia existed only as a "local connection" segment in a few exhibitions—artists from Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines were almost invisible in Taiwan's art discourse.

Chun Wen-chi's path diverged from this mainstream. In 2014, he co-initiated the Project Glocal Asian City Stream with Filipino curator Dayang Yraola¹⁰, inviting artists from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia to residencies in Taiwan for one month. In 2015, he traveled to Malaysia to co-curate the "Today in History" segment of the DA+C Arts Festival¹¹. Between 2016 and 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 on the Taiwan–Southeast Asia axis.

Why Use "Archipelago" to Replace "Southeast Asia"

The term "Southeast Asia" is a product of US geopolitical strategy during the Cold War—the Allied South East Asia Command was established in 1943 and continued as a regional label after the war. In other words, "Southeast Asia" is a term for this geography viewed from the outside.

"Nusantara" (the Malay word for "archipelago") is how the local languages name this geography themselves. In medieval Javanese documents, nusa means "island" and antara means "others"; together, they mean "between islands"—no single island is the center; every island is the "other" to some other island.

Chun Wen-chi's choice of nusantara as a framework is backed by a deeper choice of perspective: replacing colonial external naming with local self-naming, and replacing the "center–periphery" dichotomy with an "inter-island continuum." For the Taiwan art scene, the significance of this shift lies in the fact that Taiwan can be viewed as the northeastern edge of the Malay Archipelago, breaking free from the existing positions of being either "the Other of Southeast Asia" or "an isolated island of the Sinosphere."

The first phase of the Nusantara Archive project (2017–2019) was supported by a 350,000 TWD grant from the National Arts Council¹². During the first year (May 2017 to April 2018), Malaysian artists Okui Lala and Hoo Fan Chon (符芳俊) were invited for one-month residencies in Taiwan⁴. The entire project emphasized two-way, long-term exchange through residency rather than a single-event exhibition of shipped works; artists produced documents, images, and proposals during their stays. The results of the first year were compiled into NML Issue 34, Hermeneutics of Nusantara (https://www.heath.tw/nml-issue/hermeneutics-of-nusantara/) in September 2017, marking the first formal discursive articulation of this framework.

The second phase, Twinning Archipelago, launched in 2021 with a 400,000 TWD grant from the National Arts Council¹³. This phase focused on "between two archipelagos"—Taiwan as one archipelago and Malaysia/Indonesia as another—with both sides interpreting each other's historical experiences.

By 2024, the Nusantara Archive had released 1t independent publications containing over 40 bilingual (Chinese/English) documents¹⁴. For a project without a commercial model, operating through NGO grants and institutional collaborations, this is an extremely rare accumulation.

The Shadow of a Transnational Curatorial Network

The No Man's Land ABOUT page lists a seven-person editorial advisory committee: Huang Wen-hao (DAF founder / ET@T); Chiu Hsiu-chi (Malaysian contemporary artist / video 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 community); Wu Ting-kuan (Chun Wen-chi's long-term guest editor); and Huang Tsung-ying¹⁵.

This list is essentially a directory of a transnational curatorial network. Four from Taiwan (Huang Wen-hao / Takamori Nobuo / Lo Shih-tung / Huang Tsung-ying + Wu Ting-kuan) + two from Malaysia (Chiu Hsiu-chi / YAP Sau Bin) + one practitioner-editor. It is not an "art world celebrity list"—it is a list of people who have truly co-curated, published, and held residencies together.

The concrete instantiation of this network is scattered beyond NML: When Takamori Nobuo curated the Asian Art Biennial in 2021, he engaged in a dialogue with Chun Wen-chi's archipelago framework; Chiu Hsiu-chi's personal work, the Melbourne Film Festival series, has been discussed and interviewed multiple times on NML[^1le]; In 2018, the "Border Travel PETAMU Project" was initiated by the Open-Contemporary Art Workshop, co-curated by Chun Wen-chi and Lo Shih-tung.

In other words, the relationship between these seven people exceeds the formal definition of an NML advisory committee. They are a small ecosystem that has been inviting, curating, and reviewing one another between Taiwan and Malaysia/Indonesia for 12 years. NML is the writing platform for this ecosystem, but the ecosystem itself is something much larger.

Pirates, Radiowaves, and Bubbles

If 2017–2020 was the "Archipelago Period," then 2021–2022 was the "Pacific Period."

In 2022, Chun Wen-chi personally curated the issue The Piracy, the Radiowave, the Bubble (https://www.heath.tw/nml-issue/the-piracy-the-radiowave-the-bubble/), proposing three conceptual frameworks: "Pirates," "Radiowaves," and "Bubbles" are "three unconventional situations observed across the geopolitical surfaces of the Pacific, from the World Wars to the New Cold War, that traverse the boundaries of modern nation-states"¹⁶.

"Pirates" represent illegal trans-maritime flows—people, goods, information, genes.
"Radiowaves" represent the unique role of radio in the Asian Cold War—Chun Wen-im wrote: "The local history of 'radiowaves' originates from the late 1930s during the Japanese Empire's rule of Taiwan, utilizing radio broadcasting to propagate the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere across Southern China and Southeast Asia, thus making Taiwan the southernmost base for the Empire's broadcasting efforts"¹⁷.
"Bubbles" represent the digital capitalism bubble of the New Cold War era—Facebook, streaming platforms, NFTs, the metaverse.

These three frameworks constitute a continuum from historical geopolitics (Japanese colonial broadcasting) to contemporary digitality (NFT bubbles). During the same period, NML launched the Nanyang Radio Station podcast series—31 episodes in mixed Chinese and English, exploring radio as a channel between Taiwan and Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The podcast extended the framework from text to sonic objects—the Nusantara Archive expanded from document translation to the reconstruction of historical soundscapes.

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

Shrinkage: When the Grand Themes are Exhausted

Since 2023, article production for _No Man's Land has decreased significantly. From a peak of 49 articles in 2016 and 41 at the launch of the Archipelago project in 2017, it dropped to 21 in 2022 and only 5 in 2023¹⁸.

This curve can be read from two perspectives.

The Optimistic Version: The platform is entering a "settling period"—the decrease in articles is due to energy shifting toward book publishing (10 volumes of the Nusantara Archive imprint), podcast production, and cross-organizational curation (e.g., akaSwap, Volume DAO, and other Web3 collaborations). Chun Wen-chi himself has begun serving as a nominee observer for the Taiwan Shin Art Awards (2018–2019, 2023), bringing the discourses accumulated by NML into mainstream curatorial judging.

The Pessimistic Version: A platform driven by a single editor for 12 years has hit a structural ceiling—no successor, no mobile interface, Web 1.0 design, and a younger generation that does not read long-form WordPress articles. Once the grand themes (the Archipelago) have been exhausted, the platform will age along with them.

Both versions are valid. They are two facets of the same reality.

✦ Chun Wen-chi has voluntarily placed himself in the periphery for 12 years; this choice allowed him to see things the Taiwan art scene cannot—but the peripheral perspective also has its own blind spots: when the grand themes are exhausted, the platform will age along with them.

The 2023 Volume DAO Lecture

On May 14, 2023, during the exhibition Taipei Living Room: Island Hash 2023 hosted by Volume DAO, Chun Wen-chi and Lo Shih-tng co-presented "Art Communities and the Global South"¹⁹. This was an NFT/on-chain community exhibition—a field entirely different from the "Malay Archipelago residency" topics he has written about for the past 12 years.

However, the subtitle of the lecture was Understanding the "Global South" through Historical Geography and On-chain Communities. Chun Wen-chi expanded the "South" framework from the geography of the Malay Archipelago to on-chain communities—suggesting his next stage of thinking regarding the "Archipelago" framework.

This shift is not necessarily a continuation; it may be another shape of the periphery. When the geographically defined discourse of the "South" hits its ceiling, he attempts to redefine what the "South" is once more within the blockchain. Is the on-chain community of Web3 another form of "archipelago"—decentralized, interconnected, and replacing centralized narratives with tokenized historical memories?

Twelve years ago, he wrote reviews for ArtTalks; in 2017, he launched the Nusantara Archive; in 2023, he sat on the Volume DAO podium explaining the "South" to an audience of NFT enthusiasts. The number of NML articles may continue to shrink, but the 56 issues, 384+ articles, 10 volumes of the Nusantara Archive, and 40+ bilingual documents will not grow old.

The 12-year accumulation of a peripheral platform is more important than its mere "survival."

Further Reading

• Taiwanese Curators and the Construction of Art and Culture — The discourse development and imaging trends of the generation of Taiwanese curators including Takamori Nobuo (NML Advisory).
• Taiwan New Media Art — A forty-year digital art history from Yuan Kuang-ming's video works to VR and generative art; Chun Wen-chi's critical trajectory runs parallel to this main line.
• Taiwan Soundscapes — Sound artists such as Wang Fu-rui, Yao Chung-han, and Chang Yung-ta; most of their works have been deeply reviewed in the No Man's Land "Sound Scene" category.
• Contemporary Art— An overview of the overall ecosystem of Taiwan's contemporary art; a complete discursive map can be seen after adding Chun Wen-chi's archipelago framework.
• Taiwan Indigenous Contemporary Art — A field less frequently touched by NML; reading this allows for a comparison between the "Austronesian Homeland Hypothesis" and the potential intersections with the archipelago framework.

References