Fang Hsu-chung: The Child of a Pingtung Military Dependents' Village Who Turned the Three Major Awards Ceremonies into Taiwan Memory

30-second overview: Fang Hsu-chung was born in 1978 in Gonghe New Village, Donggang, Pingtung. He graduated from the art and design department at the private Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School, and later studied in the evening division of the metalwork group in the Department of Crafts and Design at National Taiwan University of Arts. In 2013, he founded the design studio Joe Fang Studio. Beginning in 2016, after Chen Chen-chuan invited him to direct the key visual for the 27th Golden Melody Awards, he went on to serve multiple times as visual director for the Golden Melody, Golden Bell, and Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan's three major awards ceremonies. He is the first Taiwanese designer to have fully directed the key visuals for all three, and has been nominated seven times for the Golden Melody Award for Best Album Packaging.

Fang Hsu-chung was born in 1978 in Gonghe New Village, Donggang, Pingtung. The military dependents' village was the world of his childhood: narrow lanes, sheet-metal roofs growing hot under the blazing sun, and neighbors' conversations passing through the walls. Gonghe New Village was a typical postwar military dependents' village settlement in Taiwan. Most residents were military families from different provinces of China, bringing together a mix of dialects and cuisines. This mixed texture later surfaced repeatedly in Fang's design, producing a visual sensibility marked by everyday bustle and traces of lived life. His work follows neither a pure "Chinese style" nor the flat language of modernism, instead showing the distinctive density of the military dependents' village. ¹

After leaving Pingtung for schooling in northern Taiwan, he first entered the art and design department at the private Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School, one of Taiwan's most historically significant vocational schools for art and design, where he built a foundation in manual training: sketching, composition, printing processes, and typographic arrangement. He later studied in the evening division of the metalwork group in the Department of Crafts and Design at National Taiwan University of Arts. Working in the design industry during the day and returning to school at night allowed him to train simultaneously between academic theory and the practical field. His metalwork training gave him sensitivity to materials and craft, which would often return in his later album packaging design as a sense of physical presence.

The Birth of Joe Fang Studio

In 2013, Fang Hsu-chung founded the design studio Joe Fang Studio. The Chinese name "Jiu Fang" is a homophonic rendering of his English name, Joe Fang, and also echoes the working attitude of "investigating the method." The studio's scope spans graphic design, brand planning, event curation, and installation art. Its core team is small, but Fang personally participates in setting the design direction for every project. ²

In the studio's early years, most of the projects he took on were music-related: album design, concert key visuals, and band identities. His long experience working with musicians allowed him to develop a distinctive way of handling the question of how visuals can carry sound. He does not tend to turn musical content into an illustrative "translation." Instead, he extracts the music's most essential emotional structure and lets the visual carry an equivalent tension.

Joe Fang Studio has also participated in the curation and identity design of many independent music scenes: visuals for small livehouses, key visuals for Legacy concerts, albums for the band Fire EX., and projects related to Mayday. He built a deep collaborative network with Taiwan's independent and pop music ecosystem of the 2010s, and is regarded as one of the core designers of this generation's music visuals.

The studio's working model also differs sharply from that of traditional advertising agencies. It does not rely on large-scale pitch competitions, instead slowly accumulating projects through word of mouth among musicians. It does not depend on rapidly producing large numbers of visual proposals, but gives each project sufficient time for dialogue. This rhythm of "slow work" has given Joe Fang Studio a distinctive position in Taiwan's design scene: its output is not large, but each work has a high degree of recognizability and completion.

Beyond the Golden Melody Awards, Fang has also long served as visual consultant for the Legacy series of performance venues. Legacy is a mid-sized livehouse in Taipei's Huashan precinct. Since opening in 2009, it has become an important venue for independent and pop music performances in Taiwan, and the visual system Fang built for it remains in use today.

2016: The Beginning of the Three Major Awards

In 2016, Chen Chen-chuan invited Fang Hsu-chung to direct the key visual for the 27th Golden Melody Awards. This marked the beginning of his relationship with Taiwan's three major awards ceremonies. Chen is the founder of Young Hope Entertainment and has long overseen production coordination for the Golden Melody Awards. His collaboration with Fang initiated a generational renewal of the Golden Melody Awards' visual branding. The ceremony design, which had previously been relatively formulaic, shifted toward key visual narratives with a contemporary design language that could become publicity events in themselves. ³

Fang subsequently served the Golden Melody Awards over the long term and expanded to the Golden Bell Awards and Golden Horse Awards, becoming the first designer to fully direct the key visuals for Taiwan's three major awards ceremonies. For each year's ceremony key visual, he does not reuse elements from the previous edition, but reconceives the work in response to that year's atmosphere. This working model of "starting over from scratch every year" places enormous pressure on a designer, but it has also turned the visuals of the three major awards into an annual cultural event anticipated by audiences.

From the Golden Melody Awards to the Golden Horse Awards, what he established was not a single style. Across years of collaboration with the three major awards, he developed a working method: finding a visual language for the Taiwanese music and moving images of the present age. Even within the Golden Melody Awards, the 2017 visuals emphasized intergenerational dialogue, while the 2019 visuals addressed the temporality of music. Each year's proposition was different.

Golden Horse 55 in 2018: "Supporting Role"

For the 55th Golden Horse Awards in 2018, Fang Hsu-chung directed the key visual and proposed "Supporting Role" as the central concept. The poster reconfigured the side-profile contours of major figures in Sinophone cinema, including Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Gong Li, and Xiao Ye, overlaying the profile lines into a ridge-like form. It paid tribute to cinema predecessors while echoing the Golden Horse Awards' spirit that "a film is accomplished by more than its leading roles." ⁴

This set of key visuals prompted wide discussion in Sinophone film circles and came to be seen as one of the representative cases in the Golden Horse Awards' brand narrative. The concept of "supporting role" appears modest on the surface, but in fact bore the politically sensitive atmosphere of that year's Golden Horse Awards. That year saw the "Taiwan is an independent entity" incident at the awards ceremony. The key visual's proposition that "achievement is composed of supporting roles" instead became a visual annotation of the Golden Horse Awards' core values.

Fang's visual work for the Golden Horse Awards went far beyond the key visual poster, extending into the full brand system of stage visuals, program booklets, admission tickets, and media materials for the ceremony. The entire visual system maintained consistency of language, preserving equal recognizability from printed materials to large LED screens. Such completeness is relatively rare in the visual operation of cultural awards in Taiwan.

Seven Golden Melody Award Nominations for Best Album Packaging

Fang Hsu-chung has been nominated seven times for the Golden Melody Award for Best Album Packaging, and has long worked with Taiwanese musicians on album packaging. His designs do not depend on ornate printing or elaborate craft, but transform the core emotion of the music into a single forceful visual proposition, giving physical albums a reason to be collected even in the streaming era. ⁵

He has long-term collaborative relationships with many Taiwanese musicians, from Fire EX., Mayday, and Sodagreen to musicians of younger generations. Fang's album designs are often treated as "extended listening" for the physical version of the work. The cover, inner pages, inserts, and material choices for special packaging all enter into dialogue with the music itself.

This insistence on physical packaging is related to Fang's training in craft. His background in metalwork made him sensitive to materials. He understands that the differences in touch and sheen among coated paper, woodfree paper, and specialty paper directly affect the listener's reading mood. In the streaming era, he insists on designing the physical album as "an object that cannot be replaced by the digital."

The Florist Project and Local Participation

Fang Hsu-chung launched the Florist Project, a content project spanning design, photography, and writing, with each issue exploring memory, family, and the times through a different theme. The Florist Project exceeds the scope of a design project. It is closer to Fang's personal content creation. Working with writers, photographers, and musicians, he transforms private subjects that would not usually appear in commercial design projects into books and exhibitions that can be read. ⁶

He has also long participated in promoting local culture in Pingtung. The 2019 Pingtung Design Expo was the first large-scale city design branding action initiated by a local government in Taiwan. As someone from Pingtung, Fang participated in this process and fed his visual language back into his hometown. In Pingtung, he has taken on many kinds of projects, including lantern festival visuals, souvenir packaging, local brand identities, and visual systems for the reuse of old buildings. These works were not cameo appearances by someone returning home in glory. For him, they were long-term participation in urban culture.

Design Philosophy: Beginning from the Military Dependents' Village

In multiple interviews, Fang Hsu-chung has said that his childhood in the military dependents' village of Donggang, Pingtung, is the root of his design. His preferred visual language, including the texture of old objects, hand-drawn traces, and typefaces with warmth, all come from the visual memories of a concrete place, era, and way of life, rather than from an abstract concept of "Eastern aesthetics." For him, the word "East" is too large and too empty. He would rather anchor his works in a specific lane, a specific smell, or a specific family memory. ⁶

He often emphasizes that "designers must know how to tell stories." But this story is not marketing rhetoric. It is the designer's transformation of their own life experience. Fang believes that if design is only a display of visual technique, then any designer with the same training could produce it. But if design can carry the depth of a designer's life, then it cannot be replaced.

This emphasis on the designer's life experience has also shaped his distinctive preferences in cultivating young designers. In lectures and workshops on different occasions, what he repeatedly stresses is not software technique or layout rules. He hopes young designers will "first put their own lives in order": where you come from, what you care about, and which experiences your aesthetic comes from are the roots that determine how deep design can go.

Significance for Taiwan's Design Scene

Fang Hsu-chung is one of the few designers in Taiwan's design scene who is locally formed yet possesses international-level operational ability. He did not study overseas. His educational background consists of Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School and the evening division at National Taiwan University of Arts. In the past, this entirely local path of formation was considered unlikely to compete with designers trained in the United States or Europe for high-level branding projects.

Yet Fang's work trajectory proves another possibility: rooting oneself in local experience, building a long-term local collaborative network, and honestly presenting the perspective of a child from a Pingtung military dependents' village instead became his irreplaceable competitiveness. The decision by national-level cultural awards such as the three major awards ceremonies to work with him amounted to Taiwan's cultural system recognizing that a "local perspective" could take charge of Taiwan's largest-scale cultural narratives. ⁷

For the younger generation of Taiwanese designers, Fang Hsu-chung offers a path that does not require first "becoming an international designer" before taking on major projects. From Pingtung to the three major awards, the existence of this path is itself an important reference point for design education in Taiwan.

Writing Beyond Design

In addition to visual design, Fang Hsu-chung also writes about his design observations and memories of the military dependents' village. He has serialized essay columns in different media, transforming childhood life in the village, on-site observations from design work, and behind-the-scenes accounts of collaborations with musicians into readable pieces. These writings are not meant to market Joe Fang Studio. They are Fang's personal records of Taiwan's cultural field as a "designer who can write."

This cross-disciplinary writing ability also gives his curatorial work greater depth. When he serves as the visual designer for an exhibition, he is not only responsible for posters and printed matter. He carefully reads curatorial statements, speaks with curators, digests the exhibition's core proposition, and then transforms it into visuals. This posture of the "designer as reader" distinguishes him from the working model of many visual designers in Taiwan, who are responsible only for the execution stage.

Long-Term Ties with Pingtung

Fang Hsu-chung's long-term investment in Pingtung is one of the designer's most striking qualities. He has participated in advocacy for the cultural preservation of Gonghe New Village, city branding projects for the Pingtung County Government, the Pingtung Design Expo, and visuals for local festivals, among many other projects. He has never treated Pingtung as a hometown that he "once came from and has now left." For him, Pingtung is a base where he maintains long-term practical participation.

This local participation is also reflected in his personal media presence. On Instagram, in interviews, and in documentaries, he has repeatedly mentioned Donggang, Pingtung; Gonghe New Village; his mother in childhood; and the neighbors of the military dependents' village, transforming private memories into public narratives. For the younger generation of people from Pingtung, Fang Hsu-chung's very presence is concrete proof that "someone from Pingtung can reach the summit of Taiwan's design scene."

References

Further Reading

• Joe Fang Studio official website — The design studio founded by Fang Hsu-chung
• Hsiao Qing-yang — A Taiwanese visual designer of the same generation and Grammy Award winner