The Complex Life Festival: Two Medical Students' 'Unsuccessful People's Forum' and a Generation's Five-Year Refusal to Admit 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: Hsiao Hao-ning from the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) department, and Huang Yen-lin (online alias Huang Tou-ni) from the Western Medicine department. The name playfully inverts the "Simple Life Festival" of the Jonathan Lee generation, positioning participants as "unsuccessful people," with two to three hundred attendees per edition, allowing only talk of "growth" and forbidding talk of "success" ¹. Five years later, the main organizer Hsiao Hao-ning stayed in Taichung as a TCM doctor, opened a bookstore, and lost his election for city councilor; visual assistant Huang Tou-ni abandoned medicine for cryptocurrency and became a Democracy Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School in 2025 ². A forum that rejected "success" saw its organizers and attendees eventually walk into various forms of success, yet its sharpest question remains the one Hsiao Hao-ning asked on stage: "Do you want to die with regret, or live by giving 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. Images of breast cancer cells, inflamed tissues, and necrotic slices were magnified, colored, and framed into an exhibition titled "Moaning with Illness: Pathological Aesthetics · Pathology Slide Image Exhibition" ⁴.

The curators were sixteen medical students. Their message was simple: Things viewed as "illness" can possess beauty when viewed from a different distance and under different light. The curatorial statement on the展板 was direct: pathological appearances under a microscope can still be beautiful ⁴. This exhibition did not end after its run; 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: Huang Yen-lin and Hsiao 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: asking whether "unsuccess" also has its own appearance when viewed from a different distance.

It is necessary to place these two individuals in different positions, as later stories often conflated them. Huang Yen-lin studied Western Medicine (Medical Department); Hsiao Hao-ning studied Traditional Chinese Medicine. Same university, different departments, two completely different training systems: one learned about slides, imaging, and resident physician shifts; the other learned about pulse diagnosis, herbal formulas, 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" (Xi Bian) — being an outsider within one's own department, with minds not focused on where the white coat should go ⁵. This self-description is crucial; it signifies an active stance of stepping to the margin. The white coat is the center drawn for medical students by the world; they refused to stand there.

In May 2016, Hsiao Hao-ning tagged a list of names on Facebook. The tagging criteria were strange: he sought people who fit the keywords "eighth-generation, continuous workaholic, repeated practice, edge of the department, bringing friends brings infinite hope" ¹. This string of keywords itself constituted an invisible entry specification: it did not ask about grades or titles, but whether you had the drive to "make life exhausting." About three hundred comments flooded the post; after forty days of fermentation, the first edition was organized. A gathering that would last five years began with a Facebook post and forty days of comment fermentation, without a venue, budget, or sponsors, only a group of people who could not 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 in this name, one must first know who it is talking to.

The "Simple Life Festival" is known to almost every Taiwanese. Founded in 2006 by Jonathan Lee, Chang Pei-jen, and Ma Tian-zong from the Rock Records circle, its 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 literati consumer aesthetics. Buying a ticket, entering the venue, listening to music, and drinking craft beer on the grass constituted a carefully designed "simplicity." Ten years later, for its 20th anniversary, it invited Wu Bai and Jonathan Lee to perform on the same stage ⁶, having already lived itself into a Taiwan lifestyle brand.

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

Underneath this witty remark lies a generation claiming the label pasted onto them.

📝 Curator's Note
The common narrative says the Complex Life Festival is "a pure gathering of young people 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 has not even achieved settlement. Picking up words originally carrying 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 ourselves.

This generation has many names. In 2017, journalist Wu Cheng-hsien wrote Disaffected Generation (Yan Shidai), defining them as "twenty to thirty-four years old, born with a mouse 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 most educated, best at foreign languages, most skilled with tools, yet 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 Collapsed Generation (Beng Shidai), discussing the same group facing corporatization and impoverishment. Earlier was "22K," referring to the Ministry of Education's internship program for college graduates in response to the 2008 financial crisis from 2009 to 2011, with a monthly salary of 22,000 NTD and over 30,000 slots; 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 when hiring, pushing down this generation's starting salaries 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 exhausting, so they called it "Complex." This is not stubbornness; it is an act of seizing the power of naming — I accept the label you gave, but I decide what it means.

Years later, the main organizer Hsiao Hao-ning looked back at this matter, with a title that perfectly annotated the entire gathering: It is too hard to be simple; let's explore complexity together ⁹.

Hsiao Hao-ning talks about the Complex Life Festival (Ministry of Education Youth Development Administration's "Super Wall Tuesday" series). The video title "It is too hard to be simple, let's explore complexity together" perfectly turns the juxtaposition of this gathering with the "Simple Life Festival" into its signature.

A Hotel California You Can Enter But Never Leave

The Complex Life Festival venue: A scale of two to three hundred people, speakers and audience mixed together, 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 unique. There was no host; the boundary between speakers and audience was blurred, often chatting for four hours on the grass at night ¹⁰. Hsiao Hao-ning used the concept of "Stone Soup" to recruit people. It is an old story: several soldiers said they would cook soup with stones; passing villagers brought a handful of salt, another brought a few carrots, and finally, they really cooked a pot of soup. The Complex Life Festival operated this way: the organizers only placed one stone and a pot; the content was brought by those who came.

The first edition had thirty groups of sharers, cutting across the eighth-generation independent creative ecology: 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 Good School, and the Migrant People studio focusing on Southeast Asian migrant workers ¹⁰. Spreading out this list reveals a small universe grown by Taiwan's youth in 2016: presentations, music, literature, education, new immigrants; none of these are positions mainstream industries look up to, but everyone was doing them seriously.

A speaker shares in front of a projection screen; the Complex Life Festival's iconic pixel dot-matrix banner hangs on the wall. The visual language of the entire gathering is an intentional "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 truly held the venue in a hotel ¹¹. The name comes from the famous lyric in the Eagles' song: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." The song originally described a glamorous yet trapping intoxication; applied to the Complex Life Festival, it took on a different meaning — it described a group of people who found their kind in each other; once inside, they could never leave, because there was no other place outside where one could speak like this. A metaphor of "entering but never leaving"; Huang Tou-ni also used the phrase "The Hotel California that is entered but never left was truly held in a hotel" in a later visual design article ¹¹.

By this point, the Complex Life Festival had its own shape. Za School (Za Xue Xiao) grew into Asia's largest educational carnival; "Teach For Taiwan" followed an organized talent recruitment path; the Complex Life Festival deliberately maintained a scale of two to three hundred people, small enough for everyone to speak 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 becomes sick; performance replaces communication, scale replaces depth. The Complex Life Festival chose to stay in the shadows; this was its pride, and later, its ceiling.

Over five editions, about 1,500 people came; this number is almost invisible next to Za School's carnivals of 200,000 to 300,000人次; but for the Complex Life Festival, "small" was an intentional choice, not a sign of not growing up. It wanted that density where everyone could speak to everyone; once enlarged, the thing it cared about most would be diluted.

✦ "We are not a forum; we are gathering family without blood ties to come home for the New Year." ¹³

The Backward-Facing Triangle

The "Shoe Stop Youth" sign and the one-earth sneaker 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 the 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 the subtitle posing a question: "Why complicate when you could be simple?" ¹⁴ "Buddhist" was the buzzword of those two years, describing a lying-flat mentality of "whatever, doesn't matter, no strong desire." The Complex Life Festival used it as a theme, which itself was a counter-question: a group of workaholics who made life exhausting talking about "Buddhist" was actually talking about "we could choose to not care, why do we still not 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 third edition "Buddhist Youth" scene: Behind the speaker is a handwritten "Buddhist Youth" banner; next to it is a 59:59 countdown clock. The countdown clock is the Complex Life Festival's obsession with "depth"; every share is framed by time, forcing speakers to speak to the end. Photo: Complex Life Festival (fair use editorial commentary).

This edition invited a three-way dialogue; the three people 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"; 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's three-way dialogue: Three sofas arranged in a triangle, Audrey Tang, Liu An-ting, and Lin Yi-ying facing inward, red, blue, and yellow curtains hanging down. This is the "backward-facing triangle" itself: turning the 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. Hsiao Hao-ning said, "Deep dialogue, distance-free and nearly苛刻 (harsh/strict) deep dialogue," is the signature of this gathering ¹³. The word "harsh" is accurate — it does not want lukewarm small talk; it wants to force the speakers to have no way out.

Audrey Tang's profile at the three-way dialogue site. At that time, she was 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 the 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 few to take risks; the two are inherently tense. Liu An-ting followed with "Innovation comes from the margins" ¹⁵. She meant that truly new things rarely emerge from the center of the system, but grow from ignored corners, from people with no resources who can only think of their own ways. This sentence is often mistakenly attributed to the organizer, but it is Liu An-ting's, not Hsiao Hao-ning's. A forum for "unsuccessful people" had the most promising people of this generation sitting on stage, talking about "innovation comes from the margins" — while the audience sitting below were exactly those who thought they were on the margins but later walked into the center one by one.

There was also an anecdote remembered by the audience for a long time during 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 margins, such a nonsensical question appeared, and Audrey Tang seriously caught it. This image is actually very "Complex Life Festival" — it allows harsh depth and youthful nonsense to coexist, because these two things are essentially 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, one finds 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; this sentence 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 from the third edition's three-way dialogue. She founded "Teach For Taiwan" to send teachers to remote areas; the sentence "Innovation comes from the margins" 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 Redemption Coupons

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 forum speakers and audience; at night they became villagers of the same village. Entering the village required a "Villager Pass"; inside the village, one exchanged "Cocktail Redemption" coupons for drinks.

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

Pixel banners hung on the walls of Si Guan in Fengjia; the whole space was soaked in that dot-matrix font visual language. This pixel aesthetic was not chosen randomly. Dot-matrix fonts are the characters of early computers and early game consoles; they are the screen memories of this eighth-generation when they were children. Using them for a 2018 youth gathering is saying: We are a generation raised 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 one could still say this was an "event"; at night, with passes, redemption coupons, alcohol, pixel banners, and four hours of endless grass conversations — it had grown into a village that only existed for one night. The next day 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 those actually tagged in via 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 excluded another group: migrant workers in factories, same-age peers who did not go to university, and the truly marginalized eighth-generation 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 selective than any ticketing mechanism.

Exclusion also had a geographic layer. All five editions were held in Taichung; speakers and participants were mostly from the central Taiwan circle, keeping it far from the eighth-generation 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 communication" is essentially different from "the overall face of the eighth-generation." Hsiao 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 solving it. Knowing your gathering is selective is separated from organizing a non-selective gathering 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 unsuccessful, later disproportionately walked into elite positions. Huang Tou-ni went to Harvard; speaker Audrey Tang became a minister; Liu An-ting won an international education award. Thus, the humble term "unsuccessful" looks back like a pre-emptive Versailles (humblebrag). But reading it this way is also unfair. When this group gathered in 2016, they were truly not yet successful; low wages, an invisible future, and marginalization in their own departments were all immediate realities. The problem is not whether they became successful later, but that this gathering was designed from the start to only hold "unsuccessful people on the way to success." It excluded those who could not 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 academic eyes, in 2019, someone used the 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迸发出 (bursting forth) the potential to disturb reality. Foucault's examples are gardens, cemeteries, theaters, and ships; these places are within the daily, yet follow another set of rules. The author's observation is that the Complex Life Festival broke the boundary between speakers and listeners, allowed people with similar themes to 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 was squeezed into the same two-day, one-night space."

But this article 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 the Complex Life Festival's heterotopia is one-time: it appears out of thin air on a weekend in May, and disappears on Monday. The sense of belonging it creates is real, but can this sense of belonging survive the 363 days after the event disperses?

After a two-day, one-night gathering of kindred, everyone returns to their respective complex lives.

ㄇㄉㄈㄎ: Jargon Only the Echo Chamber Understands

Fourth Edition "ㄇㄉㄈㄎ" Main Visual: Huang Tou-ni hand-drew the Zhuyin standard characters for motherfucker, a juvenile jargon only the echo chamber could understand. Image: Huang Tou-ni Design (fair use editorial commentary).

The fourth edition pushed this "only for insiders" temperament to the extreme.

In 2019, the theme was four Zhuyin symbols: ㄇㄉㄈㄎ. Decoded, it is the Zhuyin spelling of the English word motherfucker ²⁰. This is a puzzle only those who understand Zhuyin and can 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 hand-drawn Zhuyin standard character set, defining the tone as "being disciplined while speaking boundless nonsense" ²¹, a juvenile 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 obedient appearance," which is exactly the写照 (portrayal) 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 that looked like a honeycomb ²⁰. Choosing this building had its reasons. First Plaza is an old building full of Southeast Asian migrant worker life traces; on weekends it was crowded with migrants from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, serving as the living room for Taichung's migrants. In Taichung people's memories, it was once stigmatized, treated as a place "not to go," and later slowly rediscovered, renamed Dongxiang Plaza, and treated as a hub of multiculturalism. A group of youth talking about "margins" held their gathering in this building with the most marginal 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 family without blood ties to come home for the New Year." "Deep dialogue, distance-free and nearly harsh deep dialogue, is the 'Complex Life Festival's' signature." "We walk further together." ¹³

Describing a gathering as "New Year" and participants as "family without blood ties" is the Complex Life Festival's most moving and most dangerous self-positioning. New Year is an annual ritual with fixed seats and the whole family returning to the same table; comparing this gathering of kindred to New Year is promising a "home waiting for you every May no matter where you drift." 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 return to celebrate New Year are always those originally on this family list.

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

To understand whose the Complex Life Festival was, one must look at where these two initiators went later. Because its deepest tension is 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 alias mashbean. Around 2021, he resigned from his doctor's job. The reason he gave himself was: "Due to obsession with the deep structures 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) it is a huge turn: giving up the position of resident physician at Taipei Veterans General Hospital to chase something called "cypherpunk," a group believing cryptography and code can 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 a gradual drift, drifting from the edge of the department to outside the department, and 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 %), inviting six generative artists to create digital artworks of 10,101 Taiwan mountain peaks ²⁴. This line later moved closer to the institutional core: he entered the Ministry of Digital Development as a system engineer, moving the experience accumulated from private web3 public welfare 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 sitting at the table discussing how to reshape democracy at Harvard — this trajectory is almost the most dramatic realization of "innovation comes from the margins," just realized not 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 parties involved, explicitly ceding the position of "main organizer" to Hsiao Hao-ning, placing himself as "visual assistance." Later media, due to 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.

When the fourth edition was held, he wrote about the gathering's meaning 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 feeling good coincidentally ended together with the difficulties of managing Facebook fan pages." ²⁶ The phrase "difficulties of managing Facebook fan pages" 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 probably ends here, sealed here. 2016–2019 My Honor." ²⁷ The assistant went to Harvard; the soul stayed in the margins.

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 "assistant went to Harvard" line ²⁸.

Hsiao Hao-ning did not leave Taichung. Born in 1988 in Changhua, he was a country child surrounded by fields on all sides; his middle school grades were top in the school, he entered the Math and Science Gifted Class of Changhua High School, then entered the TCM Department of China Medical University, and is now the director of a TCM clinic in Beitou ⁵. During university, he experienced consecutive changes in his family: his mother had a stroke when he was in his second year and passed away two days later; his father became seriously ill and passed away when he was in his sixth year; at that time, his sister was in her fourth year, his brother in his second year; he was the only adult child in the family ²⁹. His father drove a taxi; his mother did home-based piecework ²⁹.

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

He is still a poet. The founding president of the China Medical University Literary Art Research Society, he also served as the general secretary of the Gengshen Youth Writing Association, winning four literary awards, including the National Student Literary Award and the National Medical Student Literary Award in modern poetry ⁵. A person studying TCM, a person writing modern poetry, a person organizing a youth gathering; these three identities do not 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" (Yin Shu-tien) ³⁰. The logic of the store's name is like him: the last paragraph of a thesis is the references; those seeking truth cannot do without it; "Where Reference is, the argument stands" ³⁰. A bookstore named after "References" is equivalent to building a physical space for the belief that "everything I say has a source and stands." This bookstore was still updating its own Podcast until the end of 2024 ³¹ — after losing the election for city councilor, the bookstore survived.

In 2018, Hsiao Hao-ning ran for Taichung Beitou District City Councilor representing 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 in the red 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 a public act like an election into a very private mourning. He also said he would contribute his "golden years from 30 to 50" to Beitou ³⁴. He lost the election, but that bookstore, 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 family without blood ties to celebrate 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 north, central, and south, interviewing eighteen seniors and holding six interviews with old friends ³⁵. A gathering standing on "face-to-face, distance-free, harsh deep dialogue" was forced to dismantle its core "face-to-face," leaving only voices separated by 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 family without blood ties" could only recognize each other through microphones in its last edition.

The podcast description had this paragraph, accurately describing the situation of that year: "From the chaotic beginning of the year... when the world had only isolation left as a path, Taiwan was fortunate to become a corner creature in the off-peak value, able to gather, meet, and chat about possible futures." ³⁵ The word "corner creature" is used with both sadness and accuracy. In 2020, the whole world was in lockdown; Taiwan was one of the few places still able to 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 dispersed — this ending is more like a metaphor of an era than any intentional design.

How to understand what this gathering, held for five years, with about 1,500 people in total, left behind? Putting it back in Taiwan after the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement makes it clearer. The average age of the movement's participants was twenty-three; over sixty percent participated in politics on the streets for the first time ³⁶. After the movement dispersed, the energy of "out of the pass, sowing seeds" 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: not elections, not coding, not 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 walking into the central government; Hsiao 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 backward-facing triangle. The Complex Life Festival's influence was not in scale, but in that moment of "recognizing kindred," and quietly stitching these seemingly separate youth lines into the same room.

Ending: You Are Always Just a Little Bit Short

The sharpest sentence of the Complex Life Festival was what Hsiao 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 whether 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 doubts every year whether it can sustain itself. A person building a home for others stands at the door, fearing every year that no one will return.

Then he told a segment, uncovering everything behind the four words "unsuccessful people":

"How many years must we spend repeatedly telling ourselves, it is because I am not strong enough, it is because I am not good enough, so I must keep moving forward? Until when can we 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 by giving up?" ³

This sentence解开 (unlocks) the mystery at the beginning. What is "unsuccessful"? It is not a humble term; Huang Tou-ni really went to Harvard; the humble term was already cashed out by reality. It is not entirely a prophecy; this group's later "success" was too varied to be summarized by a single upward line. It is more like the state Hsiao Hao-ning spoke of: a self-expectation worn by a generation, impossible to remove. Always feeling short by a little bit; always refusing to tell oneself "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." Hsiao Hao-ning stayed in Taichung, continuing to practice TCM, 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 most impossible, quietly drew a period.

The unanswered question still remained on stage: Do you want to die with regret, or live by giving up? A generation refusing to talk about success, finished asking this question, then 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 era background of the Complex Life Festival: How the 2014 movement, after dispersing on the streets, split into youth exits like the New Power Party, g0v, Za School, and the Complex Life Festival
• 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 kept 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-hat individuals
• [FAB DAO and Project %](/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 source servers. 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 Act (non-commercial educational nature, publicly released, small proportion of citation, no substantial market substitution); sources are all activity records published 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 — Two to three hundred 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 a 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 (Backward-Facing Triangle) — 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 Redemption" coupons, geometric dot-matrix font design. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• "Shoe Stop Youth" Sign — Shoe-off sign and one-earth sneaker outside the lecture room. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Fourth Edition "ㄇㄉㄈㄎ" Main Visual — Huang Tou-ni hand-drawn motherfucker Zhuyin standard characters. Image: Huang Tou-ni Design / Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.

References