The Complex Life Festival: Two Medical Students' 'Unsuccessful People's Forum' and a Generation's Five-Year Refusal to Say They Are Good Enough

30-Second Overview: The Complex Life Festival was a youth gathering held in Taichung for five editions from 2016 to 2020. The initiators were two classmates from China Medical University who were supposed to become doctors: Hsu Hao-ning from the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and Huang Yen-lin (online name Huang Tou-ni) from the Department of Western Medicine. The name playfully flips the "Simple Life Festival" of the Lee Tsung-sheng generation, positioning participants as "unsuccessful people," with two to three hundred attendees per edition, allowing only talk of "growth" but not "success" ¹. Five years later, the main organizer Hsu Hao-ning stayed in Taichung as a TCM doctor, opened a bookstore, and lost his election for city councilor; the visual assistant Huang Tou-ni abandoned medicine for cryptocurrency and became a visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2025 ². A forum that refused "success" was organized by people who later walked into various forms of success, and its sharpest question was the one Hsu Hao-ning asked on stage: "Do you want to die with regret, or live and give up?" ³

A Festival Grown Beside Pathology Slides

In late 2015, in Taichung, a row of microscopic images hung on the walls of the China Medical University Art Center. Cells of breast cancer, inflamed tissues, and necrotic slices were magnified, colored, and framed into an exhibition called "Moaning with Illness: Pathological Aesthetics · Pathology Slide Image Exhibition" ⁴.

The curators were sixteen medical students. What they wanted to say was simple: Things viewed as "ill" can have beauty when viewed from a different distance and with different light. The curatorial statement on the展板 (exhibition board) was direct: the pathological appearance under a microscope can still be beautiful ⁴. This exhibition did not end after being held; it later toured to the National Museum of Natural Science, National Taiwan University, and Tzu Chi. It transformed from a small exhibition in a university art center into something that moved and grew on its own. Among the sixteen names, two names would repeatedly appear together next: Huang Yen-lin and Hsu Hao-ning.

Half a year later, these two organized the Complex Life Festival. They moved the idea of "seeing beauty in pathology from a different distance" from under the microscope to human beings: Is there a look to "unsuccess" when viewed from a different distance?

To understand the story, these two must be placed in different positions, because later stories often mixed them up. Huang Yen-lin studied Western Medicine; Hsu Hao-ning studied Traditional Chinese Medicine. Same school, different departments, two completely different training paths: one learned about slides, images, and resident physician shifts; the other learned about pulse-taking, prescriptions, and the twelve meridians. One later became a resident physician at Taipei Veterans General Hospital; the other later opened a TCM clinic in Beitou, Taichung. They coined a term for this state: "Edge of the Department" (系邊) — being an outsider in their own department, with minds not where the white coat should be ⁵. This self-description is important; it speaks of an active posture of stepping to the edge. The white coat is the center drawn for medical students by the world; they refused to stand there.

In May 2016, Hsu Hao-ning tagged a string of names on Facebook. The tagging conditions were strange: he looked for people who fit the keywords "Eighties, continuous workaholic, repeated practice, edge of the department, bringing friends brings infinite hope" ¹. This string of keywords itself was an invisible entry specification: it didn't ask about your grades or titles, but whether you had the drive to "make life very tiring." About three hundred comments flooded in under the post; after forty days of fermentation, the first edition was organized. A gathering that would last five years started with one Facebook post and forty days of comment fermentation, with no venue, no budget, no sponsors, only a group of people who couldn't stay in their own departments recognizing each other.

The theme of the first edition was the "Unsuccessful People's Forum."

If the Simple Life Festival is Calm and Focused, Then We Call It Complex

To understand the joke of this name, you must first know who it is talking to.

Almost every Taiwanese has heard of the "Simple Life Festival." Initiated in 2006 by Lee Tsung-sheng, Chang Pei-jen, and Ma Tian-zong, a group of rock music figures, the main slogan was "Do what you like, make what you like valuable," with a temperament of "calm and focused" ⁶. It grew from 30,000 attendees in the first edition to a scale of 60,000 to 100,000 later, becoming a landmark in Taiwan's youth consumer aesthetics. Buying a ticket, entering the venue, listening to music and drinking craft beer on the grass was a carefully designed "simplicity." Ten years later, it reached its 20th anniversary, inviting Wu Bai and Lee Tsung-sheng to perform together ⁶, having already lived itself into a Taiwan lifestyle brand.

Hsu Hao-ning flipped this name directly. His version was: "If the people going to the Simple Life Festival are those who yearn for a simple and beautiful life, then we have a group of workaholics who always make life very tiring, so let's call it the Complex Life Festival" ¹.

Underneath this witty remark is a generation claiming the label stuck to them.

📝 Curator's Note
The common narrative says the Complex Life Festival is a "young people's gathering resisting commercialization." But this framework is too convenient, missing the sharper edge. What this group truly pushed back against was the previous generation's definition of "what life should look like." The "simplicity" of the Simple Life Festival is an elegance with a threshold: it assumes you are already settled, so you have the leisure to pursue simplicity. This group hasn't even achieved settlement. Picking up words with originally derogatory meanings like "complex," "unsuccessful," "workaholic," and "edge of the department" to call themselves is saying: We don't even have the qualification to be co-opted by your aesthetics, so we might as well name it ourselves.

This generation has many names. In 2017, journalist Wu Cheng-hsien wrote The Disaffected Generation (厭世代), defining them as "twenty to thirty-four years old, born with mice in their mouths, possessing the best qualities Taiwan has ever seen, yet facing low wages, poverty, and an invisible future" ⁷. The most piercing half of this definition is "possessing the best qualities Taiwan has ever seen." The generation with the highest education, best foreign languages, and most proficient tool usage is simultaneously the generation with declining starting salaries and an invisible future; these two things are squeezed into the same group of people.

Going further back, in 2011, the Taiwan Labor Front published The Collapsed Generation (崩世代), discussing the same group facing corporatization and impoverishment. Earlier was "22K," referring to the Ministry of Education's internship program for university graduates in response to the 2008 financial crisis, with a monthly salary of 22,000 NTD and over 30,000 positions; the program's original intent was to give graduates something to do, but it later became an anchor, with enterprises using it as a reference price, pushing this generation's starting salaries down for several years ⁸.

Losers, strawberries, disaffected generation, collapsed generation, 22K. What the Complex Life Festival did was to take these words thrown at them, flip them over, and use them. Called a loser, so they organized an "Unsuccessful People's Forum"; told they made life very tiring, so they called it "Complex." This isn't stubbornness; it's an act of seizing the right to name — I accept the label you gave, but I will decide what it means.

Years later, the main organizer Hsu Hao-ning himself reflected on this, with a title that perfectly annotated the entire gathering: It's too hard to be simple, let's explore complexity together ⁹.

Hsu Hao-ning himself talks about the Complex Life Festival (Ministry of Education Youth Development Administration's "Super Wall Tuesday" series). The video title "It's Too Hard to Be Simple, Let's Explore Complexity Together" perfectly turns the pairing of this gathering with the "Simple Life Festival" into its signature.

The California Hotel You Can Enter But Not Leave

The venue of the Complex Life Festival: A scale of two to three hundred people, speakers and audience mixed together, with yellow baskets of Taiwan Beer serving as stage and seats. Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

After the first edition, this gathering was held every May for five consecutive years.

The method was special. No host, the boundary between speakers and audience was blurry, often at night on the grass, one exchange could last four hours ¹⁰. Hsu Hao-ning used the concept of "Stone Soup" to recruit people. It's an old story: several soldiers said they would cook soup with stones, and passing villagers brought a handful of salt, a few carrots, and so on, finally boiling a pot of soup. The Complex Life Festival operated this way: the organizers only put in one stone and a pot; the content was brought by those who came.

The first edition had thirty groups of speakers, cutting across the independent creative ecology of the Eighties: college students making presentations, students organizing the NTU Music Festival, the literary review magazine Secret Reader, Read You a Poem Every Day posting a poem on Facebook daily, the online course platform Hahow, and the Yiren studio focusing on Southeast Asian migrant workers ¹⁰. Spreading out this list reveals a small universe grown by Taiwanese youth in 2016: presentations, music, literature, education, new immigrants; none were positions mainstream industries cared about, but everyone was doing them seriously.

A speaker shares in front of the projection screen, with the iconic pixel dot-matrix banner of the Complex Life Festival hanging on the wall. The visual language of the entire gathering is a deliberate "amateur feel": not refined, no lighting, like a club orientation rather than a brand event. Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

The second edition, in 2017, was themed "Hotel California." This edition really held the venue in a hotel ¹¹. The name comes from the famous lyric of the Eagles' song: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." The song originally spoke of a glamorous yet trapping intoxication; applied to the Complex Life Festival, it took on a different meaning — it spoke of a group of people who found their kind in each other, once entered, could never leave, because there was no other place outside where one could speak like this. A metaphor of "entering but not leaving," Huang Tou-ni also used the phrase "The California Hotel you can enter but not leave was really held in a hotel" in a later visual design article ¹¹.

By this point, the Complex Life Festival already had its own shape. Za School grew into Asia's largest educational carnival, "Teach For Taiwan" followed an organized talent recruitment path, while the Complex Life Festival deliberately maintained a scale of two to three hundred people, small enough for everyone to talk to everyone. Huang Tou-ni later listed the Complex Life Festival alongside Za School and the Pan-Knowledge Festival in an article on "knowledge entertainment," self-segregating as the "small-scale" one, and criticizing large events as infected by "spotlight black plague" ¹². The metaphor "spotlight black plague" is heavy: spotlights are originally good things, but when an event exists to be seen, it gets sick, performance replaces exchange, scale replaces depth. The Complex Life Festival chose to stay in the shadows of the spotlight; this was its pride, and later its ceiling.

Five editions added up to about 1,500 people; this number, placed next to Za School's carnivals of 200,000 to 300,000 person-times, is so small it's almost invisible; but for the Complex Life Festival, "small" was an intentional choice, not a sign of not growing up. It wanted exactly that density where everyone could talk to everyone; once magnified, the thing it cared about most would be diluted.

✦ "We are not a forum; we are gathering bloodless family to come home for New Year." ¹³

The Triangle Facing Away from the Audience

The "Shoes Off Youth" sign and a soccer shoe outside the lecture room. The Complex Life Festival held deep conversations like in someone else's living room; taking off shoes before entering echoes its self-positioning of "coming home for New Year." Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

The third edition is the most remembered edition of this gathering.

In 2018, the theme was "Buddhist Youth," with a subtitle question: "Why be complex when you could be simple?" ¹⁴ "Buddhist" was the buzzword of those two years, speaking of a lying-flat mentality of "whatever, doesn't matter, don't force it." Using this as the theme was itself a counter-question: a group of workaholics who made life very tiring, talking about "Buddhist," was actually talking about "we could choose to not care, why are we still unable to let go?" This edition was held during the day at China Medical University, and at night opened the "Complex Life Village" next to Fengjia Night Market ¹⁴.

The scene of the third edition "Buddhist Youth": Behind the speaker is a handwritten "Buddhist Youth" banner, next to a 59:59 countdown clock. The countdown clock is the Complex Life Festival's obsession with "depth"; each share is framed by time, forcing speakers to get to the bottom of their words. Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

This edition invited a three-way dialogue, three people who later became "successful" in some sense: Audrey Tang, then a Digital Minister of the Executive Yuan; Liu An-ting, the educational entrepreneur who founded "Teach For Taiwan"; and Lin Yi-ying, the Deputy Mayor of Taichung ¹⁵.

The dialogue design was strange. The three sat in a triangle, facing away from the audience, receiving questions from the audience via the online tool Slido ¹⁵.

The core image of the third edition three-way dialogue: Three sofas arranged in a triangle, Audrey Tang, Liu An-ting, and Lin Yi-ying facing inward, back to the surrounding audience, with red, blue, and yellow curtains hanging down. This is the "triangle facing away from the audience" itself: turning speakers to face each other is the Complex Life Festival's most direct declaration that "dialogue is more important than performance." Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

Speaking with their backs to the audience is itself the temperament of the Complex Life Festival: no performance, no facing the spotlight, only caring if the dialogue is deep enough. General forum speakers face the audience, speaking words for the audience to hear; these three faced each other, speaking words for each other to hear, with the audience merely allowed to eavesdrop. Hsu Hao-ning said, "Deep dialogue, distance-less and nearly harshly deep dialogue," is the signature of this gathering ¹³. The word "harsh" is accurate — it doesn't want lukewarm small talk; it wants to force speakers to a point of no retreat.

Audrey Tang's profile at the three-way dialogue site. She was then a Digital Minister of the Executive Yuan and a citizen tech advocate from g0v; two years later she became Taiwan's first Digital Minister. Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

That day, Audrey Tang said, "The government, from a perspective of fairness, is not suitable for innovation" ¹⁵. She meant that the government must treat everyone equally, while innovation is essentially a privilege for a minority to take risks; the two have inherent tension. Liu An-ting then said, "Innovation comes from the periphery" ¹⁵. She spoke of how truly new things rarely emerge from the center of the system, but grow from ignored corners, from people with no resources who can only figure things out themselves. This sentence was often mistakenly attributed to the organizer, but it was Liu An-ting's, not Hsu Hao-ning's. A forum for "unsuccessful people" had on stage the most promising people of this generation, talking about "innovation comes from the periphery" — while sitting below were those who thought they were on the periphery, but later walked into the center one by one.

There was also an anecdote remembered for a long time by the audience at the dialogue: Someone anonymously asked Audrey Tang on Slido, "What shampoo do you usually use?" ¹⁵ In a hardcore dialogue about fairness, innovation, and the government and the periphery, such a nonsensical question appeared, and Audrey Tang took it seriously. This image is actually very "Complex Life Festival" — it allows harsh depth and youthful nonsense to coexist, because these two things are inherently the same thing for this group.

The speakers of the third edition were not just these three. On site were also Lei Ya-chi, editor-in-chief of Pan-Science; Dr. Lang Chuan, who did animal behavior education; Liu Chien-ping of a local publication; Li Hsueh-cheng of the band "227"; and Lin Hsiu-chiu, who called herself an "average designer" ¹⁶. Looking at this list together, you find that the Complex Life Festival never invited people for fame. It invited people who were "seriously doing something no one understood yet"; fame was secondary. It was among this group that someone saw the irony. An observer named Chu Szu-yu wrote down her feelings that day, a sentence that became the most honest annotation of the Complex Life Festival: "Why am I pretending to be a successful person here? Am I really successful?" ¹⁷

Liu An-ting's TEDxTaipei speech, one of the speakers of the third edition three-way dialogue. She founded "Teach For Taiwan" to send teachers to rural areas; the sentence "Innovation comes from the periphery" she said at the Complex Life Festival is exactly her belief; this video lets you hear how she talks about it herself. ¹⁸

Complex Life Village: Fengjia at Night, Pixel Banners and Cocktail Vouchers

The third edition split the day and night into two completely different spaces; this design is worth pulling out to discuss separately.

During the day at China Medical University was the serious dialogue site: triangles, countdown clocks, harsh depth. After sunset, the whole group moved to a venue called "Si Guan" next to Fengjia Night Market, opening the "Complex Life Village" ¹⁴. The word "village" is interesting: during the day they were speakers and audience of the forum; at night they became villagers of the same village. Entering the village required a "Villager Pass"; inside the village, alcohol was exchanged for "Cocktail Vouchers."

The "Villager Pass" and "Cocktail Voucher" of the Complex Life Village, with geometric dot-matrix font being the visual signature of the Complex Life Festival. Calling entry a "Villager Pass" secretly rewrites an event into a temporary village: you are not coming to participate; you are coming to be a villager. Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

Pixel banners hung on the walls of Fengjia Si Guan; the whole space was soaked in that dot-matrix font visual language. This pixel aesthetic was not chosen randomly. Dot-matrix font is the font of early computers, early game consoles; it is the screen memory of this Eighties generation when they were children. Using it for a 2018 youth gathering is saying: We are a generation who grew up looking at these low-resolution screens; our nostalgia looks like this.

The Complex Life Village completely dismantled the too-formal word "forum." During the day you could still say this was an "event"; at night, with passes, vouchers, alcohol, pixel banners, and four hours of endless grass conversations — it had grown into a village that existed for only one night. The next day, when the sun rose, the village was dismantled, and villagers scattered back to their respective cities. This texture of "temporarily but seriously existing" is the hardest thing about the Complex Life Festival to replicate.

Unsuccessful People, or Future Elites

Chu Szu-yu's self-questioning pierced the hardest part of this festival to answer.

The Complex Life Festival said it accepted "unsuccessful people." But actually tagged in by Facebook were a group with cultural capital, who could afford university, and had social connections in the independent creative circle. Its screening mechanism (friends tagging friends) naturally kept another group out: migrant workers in factories, same-age peers who didn't go to university, and the truly marginalized Eighties who had no social media accounts to be tagged. To be tagged, you must first be in someone's Facebook friend list; to be in that list, you must first live a life "that this group would recognize." This invisible threshold is more picky than any ticketing mechanism.

Exclusion also had a geographical layer. All five editions were held in Taichung; speakers and participants were mostly from the central Taiwan circle, keeping it far from the Eighties of southern and eastern Taiwan. For a same-age peer living in Taitung or Pingtung, the threshold of "whether to run to Taichung for a two-day, one-night gathering" was enough to filter them out. The "kindred" of the Complex Life Festival was actually kindred with a geographical radius.

This is a structure that such gatherings cannot avoid; it need not be treated as smearing. A gathering operating on "echo chamber deep exchange" is inherently different from the "overall face of the Eighties." Hsu Hao-ning was aware of this. He self-doubted on stage every year, even saying the Complex Life Festival was the "most hated activity he ever organized" (explained later). But being aware is not the same as solving it. Knowing your gathering is picky, and organizing a gathering that is not picky, are separated by the weight of the entire structure.

📝 Curator's Note
Spreading out the participant list of the "Unsuccessful People's Forum" reveals an awkward fact: This group, calling themselves not yet successful, later disproportionately walked into elite positions. Huang Tou-ni went to Harvard; speaker Audrey Tang became a minister; Liu An-ting won international education awards. Thus, the modest term "unsuccessful" looks back like a pre-emptive flex. But reading it this way is also unfair. When this group gathered in 2016, they were truly not yet successful: low wages, invisible future, marginalization in their own departments were all immediate realities. The problem is not whether they later became successful, but that this gathering was designed from the start to only hold "unsuccessful people on the road to success." It excluded those who couldn't even stand on the starting line. Writing this out honestly is closer to its true face than packaging it as a pure utopia.

If viewed through an academic eye, in 2019 someone used French philosopher Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" to explain the Complex Life Festival ¹⁹. Heterotopia refers to a space between reality and utopia, both real and illusory, which squeezes heterogeneous elements together, thus bursting with the potential to disturb reality. Foucault's examples are gardens, cemeteries, theaters, ships; these places are in the daily routine, yet follow another set of rules. The author's observation is that the Complex Life Festival broke the boundary between speakers and listeners, let people with similar themes be adjacent in space, and constructed collective identity with banners; "strictly speaking, this is the ontology of the Complex Life Festival" ¹⁹.

In other words, the true product of the Complex Life Festival was never in the content of any lecture, but in the fact that "a group of heterogeneous people were squeezed into the same two-day, one-night space."

But this article also left an unsolved question: Heterotopia only operates for two days and one night; can the effect last? ¹⁹ This question is critical. A garden can bloom year after year; a cemetery can stay there forever; but this heterotopia of the Complex Life Festival is one-time: it appeared out of thin air on a weekend in May, and disappeared on Monday. The sense of belonging it created was real, but could this sense of belonging last for the 363 days after the event?

Two days and one nights of kindred gatherings; after the event, everyone returned to their respective complex lives.

M D F K: Jargon Only the Echo Chamber Understands

Fourth Edition "M D F K" Main Visual: Huang Tou-ni hand-drew the standard Zhuyin symbols for motherfucker, a youthful jargon only the echo chamber could understand. Image: Huang Tou-ni Design (fair use editorial commentary).

The fourth edition pushed this "only for our own people" temperament to the extreme.

In 2019, the theme was four Zhuyin symbols: M D F K. Decoded, it is the Zhuyin spelling of the English word motherfucker ²⁰. This is a puzzle only those who can read Zhuyin and know to spell it back to English can solve; that is, a code only Taiwanese, and a specific generation of Taiwanese, would smile at. Huang Tou-ni personally designed this set of hand-drawn standard Zhuyin symbols, setting the tone as "being disciplined while speaking boundless nonsense" ²¹, a youthful jargon only the echo chamber understands. Zhuyin is learned in first grade of elementary school; it is the most disciplined symbol system; using it to spell a swear word is itself an act of "secretly rebelling under the appearance of being good," which is exactly the写照 (portrait) of these medical students hiding other minds under white coats.

The venue was chosen at the Banpan Hotel on the fourth floor of Taichung's First Plaza, moving into rooms like a honeycomb grid ²⁰. There was a reason for choosing this building. First Plaza is an old building full of the life traces of Southeast Asian migrant workers; on weekends it is crowded with migrants from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, serving as the living room for Taichung's migrants. In the memory of Taichung people, it was once stigmatized, treated as a place "not to go," but was later slowly rediscovered, renamed Dongxiang Plaza, and treated as a hub of multiculturalism. A group of youth talking about "periphery" held their gathering in this building with the most periphery意味 (meaning), staying in honeycomb-like small rooms; this choice itself was an unspoken declaration.

The preface of this edition explained the core of the Complex Life Festival most clearly: "We are not a forum; we are gathering bloodless family to come home for New Year." "Deep dialogue, distance-less and nearly harshly deep dialogue, is the signature of the 'Complex Life Festival'." "We walk further together." ¹³

Calling a gathering "New Year" and participants "bloodless family" is the most moving and most dangerous self-positioning of the Complex Life Festival. New Year is an annual ritual with fixed seats, where the whole family returns to the same table; comparing this kindred gathering to New Year is promising a "no matter where you drift, every May there is a home waiting for you" belonging. It is moving because it truly provided this sense of belonging; it is dangerous because family circles have boundaries, and New Year tables have seat limits — those who can come back to celebrate New Year are always those originally on this family list.

The Soul Stayed in the Periphery, the Assistant Went to Harvard

To understand who the Complex Life Festival belonged to, you must look at where these two initiators went later. Because its deepest tension was not in the five editions of activities themselves, but in the divergence of these two people.

Huang Tou-ni's real name is Huang Yen-lin, online name mashbean. Around 2021, he resigned from his doctor's job. The reason he gave himself was: "Due to obsession with the deep structure of the internet and social networks, I resigned from my doctor's job, now dedicated to integrating the cypherpunk spirit into Taiwan's digital society." ²² This sentence reads like a resume, but拆开 (taken apart) is a huge turn: giving up the position of resident physician at Taipei Veterans General Hospital to chase something called "cypherpunk," a group who believed cryptography and code could redistribute power and protect individual freedom. His abandonment of medicine was not a dramatic moment. While still wearing the white coat, he was already organizing the Complex Life Festival; in early 2022, at a community gathering, he mentioned he was "still a doctor last year" ²³. Leaving was just a gradual drift, drifting from the edge of the department to outside the department, then to a world completely unrelated to medicine.

After leaving, he co-initiated FAB DAO, an organization using blockchain for public welfare, later launching the "Project % Hundred Mountains" (Project %), bringing together six generative artists to create digital artworks of 10,101 Taiwanese mountains ²⁴. This line later moved closer to the institutional core: he entered the Ministry of Digital Development as a system engineer, moving the experience of accumulating web3 public welfare from the民间 (folk) into the government's room; in 2025, he again received the Harvard Kennedy School's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation non-resident policy researcher fellowship ². From a person responsible for drawing posters and doing visual promotion at a small Taichung gathering, to walking to the table at Harvard to discuss how to reshape democracy — this trajectory was almost the most dramatic realization of "innovation comes from the periphery," just not realized by Liu An-ting who said it, but by the visual assistant who sat in the audience back then.

But regarding whose work the Complex Life Festival was, Huang Tou-ni himself spoke clearly. He wrote in his own article: "Complexity reasonably became Hao-ning's creation; we continued to exist in the work team as visual assistance." ²⁵ This sentence is important; it comes from the当事人的 (party involved) mouth, clearly giving the position of "main organizer" to Hsu Hao-ning, placing himself as "visual assistant." Later media, because of Huang Tou-ni's web3 fame, often wrote the Complex Life Festival as "the youth of the FAB DAO founder," but Huang Tou-ni himself never said this.

By the fourth edition, he wrote about the meaning of this gathering to him: "The end of Complex Life Festival 4 symbolizes the end of an era for me personally; the era of always dreaming and always cool ended simultaneously with the difficulties of Facebook fan page management." ²⁶ The phrase "Facebook fan page management difficulties" pointed to a structural turning point of the era — the Complex Life Festival grew up being tagged on Facebook and growing on Facebook fan pages; when Facebook's algorithm continuously lowered organic reach, this gathering relying on organic social connection also lost its oxygen.

Then came the sentence like a farewell, or like an archive: "Those four years, what Complex taught me is probably about here, sealed here. 2016–2019 My Honor." ²⁷ The assistant went to Harvard; the soul stayed in the periphery.

Huang Tou-ni's web3 public welfare works after abandoning medicine (Digital Times interview). From the visual promotion of the Complex Life Festival to the co-founder of Taiwan's largest public welfare NFT project, this video is the next stop on the line of "the assistant went to Harvard." ²⁸

Hsu Hao-ning did not leave Taichung. Born in 1988 in Changhua, a countryside child surrounded by fields, his middle school grades were top in the school; he entered the Math and Science Gifted Class of Changhua Senior High School, then entered the TCM Department of China Medical University; he is now the director of a TCM clinic in Beitun ⁵. During college, he experienced consecutive changes in his family: his mother had a stroke when he was in his sophomore year and died two days later; his father became seriously ill and died when he was in his senior year; at that time his sister was in her senior year of college, his brother was in his sophomore year of high school; he was the only adult child in the family ²⁹. His father drove a taxi; his mother did piecework at home ²⁹.

These are facts reported publicly; no need for embellishment; but they are the底色 (base color) for understanding why he stayed — a person who lost both parents during six years of college and shouldered a family, has a different weight for the thing of "staying in place and holding things together."

He is still a poet. The founding president of the China Medical University Literary and Art Research Society, he also served as the general secretary of the Gengshen Youth Writing Association, winning four literary awards, including the Modern Poetry Award of the National Student Literature Award and the National Medical Student Literature Award ⁵. A person studying TCM, a person writing modern poetry, a person organizing youth gatherings; these three identities have no conflict in him, but are like three facets of the same thing: all seeking a "ability to see people more clearly."

Later, when he looked for a campaign headquarters, he accidentally encountered an old house, felt it was suitable for a bookstore, and opened a bookstore called "Reference" ³⁰. The logic of the store name is like him: the last paragraph of a thesis is the references; people seeking truth cannot do without it; "Where the Reference is, the argument stands" ³⁰. A bookstore named after "references" is equivalent to building a physical space for the belief that "what I say has sources, stands firm." This bookstore was still updating its own Podcast until the end of 2024 ³¹ — the election for city councilor was lost, but the bookstore survived.

In 2018, Hsu Hao-ning ran for Taichung City Councilor in Beitun District for the New Power Party. In a district with sixteen competitors, he received 5,332 votes, a vote rate of 3.93%, ranked eleventh, lost, and the campaign account was still short by over 100,000 NTD ³². When he ran, he said a very special sentence: "I hope I can love others, to prove that I was loved by great people." ³³ A young person who just lost his parents wanted to use the act of "loving others" to prove that those who loved him really existed — this sentence turned this public act of running for election into a very private mourning. He also said he would contribute his "golden years from 30 to 50" to Beitun ³⁴. He lost the election, but that bookstore, which he only opened because he was looking for a campaign headquarters, remained. A person wanted to commemorate the most private loss (parents) in the most public way (election); what remained was the quietest shop.

The Least Cool Year

The fifth edition was the loneliest edition of this festival about "gathering kindred." In 2020, COVID arrived. A gathering whose core was "gathering bloodless family to come home for New Year" collided with a year when the whole world had to keep its distance. The theme of this edition of the Complex Life Festival was "Self-Isolation" ³⁵.

It did not hold a physical conference. It changed to a Podcast, making forty-seven episodes in total. The team ran through North, Central, and South Taiwan, interviewed eighteen seniors, and held six interviews with old friends ³⁵. A gathering established on "face-to-face, distance-less, harshly deep dialogue" was forced to dismantle its core "face-to-face," leaving only voices across microphones. The closing day was November 11, 2020; they titled this edition: "This year's Complex Life Festival is the least cool year." ³⁵

The fifth edition "Self-Isolation" changed the physical gathering to a 47-episode Podcast. A festival with the faith of "gathering bloodless family together" could only recognize each other across microphones in its last edition.

There was a passage in the podcast description that accurately described the situation of that year: "From the chaotic beginning of the year of the pandemic... when the world had only isolation left, Taiwan was fortunate to become a corner creature of the off-peak value, able to gather, meet, and chat about possible futures." ³⁵ The word "corner creature" was used with heartache and accuracy. In 2020, the whole world was in lockdown; Taiwan was one of the few places that could still gather and meet; the Complex Life Festival seized this gap, making it a program about "how to recognize each other in an era of isolation."

The fifth edition previewed the sixth, saying it would draw a free suite for listeners ³⁵. But the sixth edition had no record of being held. The physical Complex Life Festival effectively ended in 2020. A gathering with faith in gathering, with its last edition called Self-Isolation, then scattered — this ending was more like a metaphor of an era than any intentional design.

How to understand what this gathering of five years, with about 1,500 people in total, left? Placing it back in Taiwan after the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, it becomes clearer. The average age of participants in that movement was twenty-three; over sixty percent were participating in politics on the streets for the first time ³⁶. After the movement scattered, the energy of "sowing seeds after exiting the gate" split into several exits: some entered the system to create the New Power Party, winning five legislative seats in 2016; some did citizen tech with g0v, turning government data into tools everyone could use; some organized alternative education, growing into Asia's largest Za School. The Complex Life Festival took the fourth path: no elections, no coding, no recruitment, just gathering a group of same-age peers in low wages and confusion, letting them know "you are also here."

Interestingly, these four exits intersected again at the third edition of the Complex Life Festival: Audrey Tang was the representative of the g0v line entering the central government; Hsu Hao-ning himself represented the New Power Party running for election; Liu An-ting was the alternative education line — the energy diverging after 318, circling for four years, sat together again in that triangle facing away from the audience. The influence of the Complex Life Festival was not in its scale, but in that moment of "recognizing kindred," and quietly stitching these seemingly separate youth paths into the same room.

Ending: You Are Always Just a Little Bit Short

The sharpest sentence of the Complex Life Festival was what Hsu Hao-ning said on stage at the third edition.

He first admitted an embarrassing thing: "The Complex Life Festival is the most hated activity I ever organized; every year I verify if my faith is true or false. Will the people who come this year not want to come next year?" ³ A festival organizing warmth for others; the main organizer himself doubted every year if it could hold on. A person building a home for others, standing at the door himself, every year fearing no one would come back.

Then he told a passage, exposing everything behind the four words "unsuccessful people":

"How many years do we have to spend, repeatedly telling ourselves, it's because I'm not strong enough, it's because I'm not good enough, so I must keep moving forward? How long must we hold on, before we can forgive ourselves to say, I am good enough... because you will never like yourself, you are always just a little bit short. Do you want to die with regret, or live and give up?" ³

This passage unraveled the initial mystery. What was "unsuccessful"? It was not a modest term; Huang Tou-ni really went to Harvard; the modest term had already been cashed in by reality. It was not entirely a prophecy; this group's later "success" was too varied, unable to be summarized by an upward line. It was more like the state Hsu Hao-ning spoke of: a self-expectation worn by a generation, impossible to take off. Always feeling short by a little bit, never willing to say to themselves "I am good enough." The Complex Life Festival turned this collective dissatisfaction into an annual gathering — a group of people short by a little bit, mutually confirming that they were indeed short by a little bit.

Huang Tou-ni sealed it in "2016–2019 My Honor." Hsu Hao-ning stayed in Taichung, continuing to see TCM patients, continuing to care for that bookstore left behind after the election loss. In the fifth edition year, the world locked everyone into self-isolation; this festival with faith in gathering, in the year when gathering was least possible, quietly drew a period.

That unanswered question still remained on stage: Do you want to die with regret, or live and give up? A generation refusing to talk about success, finished asking this question, then each returned to their respective complex lives, continuing to live short by a little bit.

Two "Life Festivals" separated by ten years, are two answers from two generations to "what life should look like":

Further Reading:

• Sunflower Student Movement — The historical background of the Complex Life Festival: How that 2014 movement, after scattering on the streets,分流 (diverted) into the New Power Party, g0v, Za School, and the Complex Life Festival as several youth exits
• Za School — The same wave of 318 post-energy, taking the opposite path: growing into Asia's largest educational carnival, contrasting with the Complex Life Festival's "deliberately maintained small" in scale and intimacy
• Taiwan's Slash Generation — The structural background of the Complex Life Festival participants calling themselves "workaholics": How median wages and survival pressure forced this generation into multi-job holders
• [FAB DAO and Project % Hundred Mountains](/art/FAB DAO與百岳計畫) — Where Huang Tou-ni went after abandoning medicine: The next work of "integrating the cypherpunk spirit into Taiwan's digital society"

Image Sources

This article uses 8 photos of the Complex Life Festival site and main visual designs, all cached in public/article-images/society/ to avoid hotlinking to the source server. The Complex Life Festival is a discontinued non-commercial youth activity, with no CC/PD licensed image library; this article cites its public record images for editorial commentary purposes under Article 65 of the Copyright Law (non-commercial educational nature, already publicly published, small citation proportion, no substantial market substitution); sources are all activity records published publicly by the organizing team members (Huang Tou-ni) on Medium and third-edition site observation articles.

• Complex Life Festival Site (Cover) — Two participants flipping through the agenda, Taiwan Beer baskets serving as seats. Photo: Huang Po-chun Photography / Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Complex Life Festival Venue — 200-300 people squeezed in a high-ceilinged space listening to a speaker, speakers and audience mixed. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Complex Life Festival Speaker Sharing — Speaker sharing in front of the projection screen, pixel dot-matrix banners hanging on the wall. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Third Edition "Buddhist Youth" Stage — Speaker holding mic, "Buddhist Youth" calligraphy banner behind, 59:59 countdown clock. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Third Edition Three-Way Dialogue (Triangle Facing Away from Audience) — Overhead view of three sofas in a triangle, red/blue/yellow curtains, surrounding audience. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Third Edition Audrey Tang Profile — Close-up of Audrey Tang at the three-way dialogue site. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Complex Life Village Pass — Hand holding "Villager Pass" and "Cocktail Voucher", geometric dot-matrix font design. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• "Shoes Off Youth" Sign — Shoe-off sign outside the lecture room and a soccer shoe. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Fourth Edition "M D F K" Main Visual — Huang Tou-ni hand-drawn motherfucker Zhuyin standard characters. Image: Huang Tou-ni Design / Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.

References