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 founders 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 alias Huang Dou-ni) from the Department of Western Medicine. 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 discussions of "growth" and forbidding discussions of "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; his visual assistant Huang Dou-ni abandoned medicine for cryptocurrency and became a Democracy Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2025 ². A forum that rejected "success" saw its organizers and attendees eventually walk into various forms of success, and its sharpest question remains what Hsu 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. Cells of breast cancer, inflamed tissues, and necrotic slices were magnified, colored, and framed into an exhibition named "Moaning with Illness: Aesthetics of Pathology · Pathology Slide Image Exhibition" ⁴.

The curators were sixteen medical students. Their message was simple: Things viewed as "ill" can have beauty when viewed from a different distance and light. The curatorial statement on the展板 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 list of 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?

It is necessary to place these two people in different positions, because later stories often mixed them up. Huang Yen-lin studied Western Medicine (Medical Department); Hsu Hao-ning studied TCM. Same school, different departments, two completely different trainings: one learned about slides, images, and resident physician shifts; the other learned about pulse diagnosis, 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 called "Edge of the Department" (Xi Bian): being an outsider in their own department, with minds not where white coats should go ⁵. This self-description is important; it speaks of an active stance of stepping to the edge. The white coat is the center drawn by the world for medical students; 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 fitting the keywords "Eighth Generation, 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 grades or titles, but whether you had the drive to "make life exhausting." About three hundred comments flooded the post; after fermenting for forty days, the first edition was organized. A gathering that would last five years started with a Facebook post and forty days of comment fermentation, without a venue, budget, or 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 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.

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

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

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

📝 Curator's Note
The common narrative says 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 "what life should look like" defined by the previous generation for them. The "simplicity" of Simple Life Festival is an elegant threshold: it assumes you are already settled and have the leisure to pursue simplicity. But 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 let's name it ourselves.

This generation has many names. In 2017, journalist Wu Cheng-hsien wrote The Disappointed Generation (Ya Shidai), defining them as "twenty to thirty-four years old, born with mice in their mouths and 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 regressing 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 (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, Disappointed Generation, Collapsed Generation, 22K. What Complex Life Festival did was to take these words thrown at them by others, flip them over, and use them. Called a loser, they organized an "Unsuccessful People's Forum"; told they made life exhausting, 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 decide what it means.

Years later, the main organizer Hsu Hao-ning himself looked back at this, with a title perfectly annotating the whole gathering: It's too hard to be simple, let's explore complexity together ⁹.

Hsu Hao-ning talks about Complex Life Festival (Ministry of Education Youth Development Administration "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 "Simple Life Festival" into its signature.

A Hotel California You Can Enter But Never Leave

The Complex Life Festival venue: 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 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, passing villagers brought a handful of salt, I brought a few carrots, and finally, they really cooked a pot of soup. Complex Life Festival operated this way: the organizers only put in one stone and a pot, the content was brought by the people who came.

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

A speaker shares in front of a projection screen, the wall hangs the Complex Life Festival's iconic pixel dot-matrix banner. The visual language of the whole 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, 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 gorgeous yet trapping intoxication; applied to Complex Life Festival, it meant something different—it spoke of a group of people who found kindred spirits in each other, once entering, they couldn't leave, because there was no other place outside where they could speak like this. A metaphor of "entering but never leaving," Huang Dou-ni also used the phrase "The Hotel California that you can enter but never leave was really held in a hotel" in a later visual design article ¹¹.

By here, Complex Life Festival had its own shape. Za School grew into Asia's largest educational carnival, "Teach For Taiwan" followed an organized talent recruitment path, while Complex Life Festival deliberately maintained a scale of two to three hundred people, small enough that everyone could talk to everyone. Huang Dou-ni later, in an article on "knowledge entertainment," listed Complex Life Festival alongside Za School and Pan-Knowledge Festival, self-separating as "small-scale," 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. Complex Life Festival chose to stay where the spotlight couldn't reach; 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 Complex Life Festival, "small" was a deliberate choice, not a sign of not growing up. It wanted exactly that density where everyone could talk to everyone; once enlarged, the thing it cared about most would be diluted.

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

The Triangle Facing Away from the Audience

"The Shoe Stop Youth" sign and a pair of soccer shoes outside the lecture room. Complex Life Festival held deep conversations like being in someone else's living room; taking off shoes before entering, this small action echoes its self-positioning of "coming back 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 the subtitle as a question: "Why complicate 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, no strong demand." 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 can't we let go?" This edition was held during the day at China Medical University, and at night opened "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 a 59:59 countdown clock. The countdown clock is Complex Life Festival's obsession with "depth," framing each share in time, forcing speakers to speak to the end. 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, Deputy Mayor of Taichung City 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 Q&A 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, red, blue, and yellow curtains hanging down. This is the "triangle facing away from the audience" itself: turning the speakers to face each other is 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 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, the audience was only allowed to eavesdrop. Hsu Hao-ning said, "Deep dialogue, distance-less and almost 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 the speakers to have no way out.

Audrey Tang's profile at the three-way dialogue scene. At that time she was a Digital Minister of the Executive Yuan, a citizen tech advocate from g0v, and became Taiwan's first Digital Minister two years later. 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. Her meaning was that the government must treat everyone equally, and innovation is essentially a privilege for a few to take risks; the two have inherent tension. Liu An-ting then said, "Innovation comes from the margins" 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 so they can only think of ways themselves. This sentence was often mistakenly hung on the organizer's head, but it was Liu An-ting's, not Hsu Hao-ning's. A forum for "unsuccessful people," with the most promising people of this generation sitting on stage, talking about "innovation comes from the margins"—and sitting below were those who thought they were on the margins, but later one by one walked into the center.

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 government vs. margins, such a nonsensical question appeared, and Audrey Tang seriously caught it. This scene is actually very "Complex Life Festival"—it allows harsh depth and youthful nonsense to coexist, because these two things are the same thing on this group of people.

The speakers of the third edition were not just these three. On site there were also Lei Ya-qi, editor-in-chief of Pan-Science; Dr. Lang Quan, doing animal behavior education; Liu Qian-ping of local publications; Li Xue-cheng of the band "227"; and Lin Hui-qiu, who called herself an "average designer" ¹⁶. Looking at this list together, you find Complex Life Festival never invited people for fame. It invited people "seriously doing something no one understands yet," fame was secondary. And 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 footnote of 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 three-way dialogue. She founded "Teach For Taiwan" to send teachers to remote areas; the sentence "Innovation comes from the margins" she said at 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 day and night into two completely different spaces, this design is worth pulling out alone.

During the day at China Medical University was the serious dialogue venue, triangle, countdown clock, harsh depth. After sunset, the whole group moved to a venue called "Si Guan" next to Fengjia Night Market, opening "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, alcohol was exchanged for "Cocktail Vouchers."

The "Villager Pass" and "Cocktail Voucher" of Complex Life Village, geometric dot-matrix font is the visual signature of Complex Life Festival. Calling entry a "Villager Pass" secretly rewrites an event into a temporary village: you are not here to attend, 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 soaked in that dot-matrix font visual language. This pixel aesthetic was not randomly chosen. Dot-matrix font is the font of early computers, early game consoles, the screen memory of this eighth generation when they were children. Using it for a 2018 youth gathering is saying: We are a generation raised looking at these low-resolution screens, our nostalgia looks like this.

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, four hours of endless grass conversations—it had grown into a village existing only for one night. The next day the sun rose, the village dismantled, villagers scattered back to their respective cities. This texture of "temporarily but seriously existing" is the hardest thing about Complex Life Festival to replicate.

Unsuccessful People, or Future Elites

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

Complex Life Festival said it collected "unsuccessful people." But actually tagged in by Facebook were a group with cultural capital, who could afford college, with social connections in the independent creation circle. Its screening mechanism (friends tagging friends) naturally excluded another group: migrant workers in factories, same-age peers without college degrees, the truly marginalized eighth generation without social 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 "recognized by this group." This invisible threshold is more picky than any ticketing mechanism.

Exclusion has another layer: geographical. All five editions were held in Taichung, speakers and participants were mostly from the central Taiwan circle, this kept it far from the eighth generation of southern and eastern Taiwan. A same-age peer living in Taitung or Pingtung, just the threshold of "whether to run to Taichung for a two-day one-night gathering" was enough to filter them out. Complex Life Festival's "kindred spirits" were actually kindred spirits with a geographical radius.

This is a structure this type of gathering cannot avoid, no need to treat it as smearing. A gathering operating on "echo chamber deep exchange" is essentially different from "the overall face of the eighth generation." Hsu Hao-ning was aware of this. He self-doubted on stage every year, even saying Complex Life Festival was the "most hated activity he ever organized" (explained later). But being aware is not solving it. Knowing your gathering is picky, and organizing a non-picky gathering, there is the weight of the entire structure in between.

📝 Curator's Note
Spreading out the participant list of the "Unsuccessful People's Forum," you see an awkward fact: this group calling themselves not yet successful, later disproportionately walked into elite positions. Huang Dou-ni went to Harvard, speaker Audrey Tang became a minister, Liu An-ting won international education awards. So "unsuccessful" this humble term, looking back, seems like a pre-emptive Versailles. But reading it this way is also unfair. When this group gathered in 2016, they were really not yet successful, low wages, invisible future, marginalized in their own departments, all were 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 looking with an academic eye, in 2019 someone borrowed French philosopher Foucault's "Heterotopia" concept to explain Complex Life Festival ¹⁹. Heterotopia refers to a space between reality and utopia, both real and illusory, it 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, yet follow another set of rules. The author's observation is that Complex Life Festival broke the boundary between speakers and listeners, let people with similar themes be adjacent in space, used banners to construct collective identity, "strictly speaking, this is the ontology of Complex Life Festival" ¹⁹.

In other words, the true product of 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 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 Complex Life Festival's heterotopia is one-time: it appears out of nowhere on a weekend in May, disappears on Monday. The sense of belonging it creates is real, but can this sense of belonging last for the 363 days after the event?

Two days one night of kindred spirit gathering, after dispersing, everyone still returns to their respective complex lives.

M D F K: Jargon Only the Echo Chamber Understands

Fourth Edition "M D F K" main visual: Huang Dou-ni hand-drew the motherfucker Zhuyin standard characters, a youth jargon only the echo chamber can read. Image: Huang Dou-ni Design (fair use editorial commentary).

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

In 2019, the theme was four Zhuyin Fuhao symbols: M D F K. Decoded, it is the Zhuyin spelling of the English word motherfucker ²⁰. This is a puzzle only people who can read Zhuyin and know to spell it back to English can solve, meaning, a secret code only Taiwanese, and a specific generation of Taiwanese, would smile at. Huang Dou-ni personally designed this set of hand-drawn Zhuyin standard characters, setting the tone as "while being disciplined, speaking boundless nonsense" ²¹, a youth jargon, only understood by the echo chamber. Zhuyin is learned in first grade of elementary school, the most disciplined symbol system; using it to spell a swear word, this action itself is "secretly rebelling under the obedient appearance," and that is exactly the 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, staying in those grid-like honeycomb rooms ²⁰. Choosing this building has its reason. First Plaza is an old building full of Southeast Asian migrant worker life traces, on weekends crowded with migrants from Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, it is Taichung migrants' living room. In Taichung people's memory it was once stigmatized, treated as a "do not go" place, later slowly rediscovered, renamed Dongxie Plaza, treated as a multicultural base. 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 is an unspoken declaration.

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

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

Soul Left in the Margins, Assistant Went to Harvard

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

Huang Dou-ni's real name is Huang Yen-lin, online called 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 looks like a big turn: letting go of the Taipei Veterans General Hospital resident physician position, to chase something called "cypherpunk," a group believing cryptography and code can redistribute power, protect personal freedom. He abandoned medicine not in a dramatic moment. While still wearing the white coat, he was already organizing Complex Life Festival; in early 2022 at a community gathering he mentioned, "I was still a doctor last year" ²³. Leaving was a gradual drift, drifting from edge of department to outside department, then drifting to a world completely unrelated to medicine.

After leaving, he co-founded FAB DAO, an organization using blockchain for public welfare, later launched "Project %," inviting six generative artists to create digital artworks of 10,101 Taiwan mountain peaks ²⁴. This line later walked closer to the institutional core: he entered the Ministry of Digital Development as a system engineer, moving the experience accumulated from grassroots web3 public welfare into the government's room; in 2025 he again received the Harvard Kennedy School Allen Lab "Democracy Renovation" non-resident policy researcher ². From a person responsible for drawing posters and doing visual promotion at a small Taichung gathering, all the way to Harvard's table discussing how to reshape democracy—this trajectory is almost the most dramatic realization of "innovation comes from the margins," just not realized by Liu An-ting who said this sentence, but by the visual assistant who sat in the audience that year.

But regarding who Complex Life Festival was a work of, Huang Dou-ni himself spoke clearly. In his own article he wrote: "Complex reasonably became Hao-ning's creation, we as visual auxiliary continued to exist in the work team." ²⁵ This sentence is important, it comes from the person involved, clearly giving the "main organizer" position to Hsu Hao-ning, placing himself as "visual auxiliary." Later media, because of Huang Dou-ni's web3 fame, often wrote Complex Life Festival as "the youth of the FAB DAO founder," but Huang Dou-ni himself never said this.

By the fourth edition, he wrote down what this gathering meant to him: "Complex Life Festival 4 ends, for me personally symbolizes the end of an era, the era of always dreaming and always cool ended coincidentally with the difficulty of Facebook fan page operation." ²⁶ The phrase "Facebook fan page operation difficulty" points to a structural turning point of the era—Complex Life Festival grew up relying on Facebook tagging, Facebook fan pages, when Facebook's algorithm lowered organic reach all the way, this gathering relying on social organic connection also lost its oxygen.

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

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

Hsu Hao-ning did not leave Taichung. He was born in 1988 in Changhua, a rural child surrounded by fields, top grades in middle school, entered Changhua High School's math and science gifted class, then entered China Medical University's TCM department, now is the director of a TCM clinic in Beitou ⁵. During college he experienced consecutive family changes: his mother had a stroke when he was in his second year, died 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 before his death, his mother did home-based piecework ²⁹.

These are facts reported publicly, no need to add rendering; but they are the background color understanding why he stayed—a person who lost both parents during six years of college, shouldering a family, has a different weight for "staying in place and holding things together."

He is still a poet. The founding president of China Medical University's Literary Art Research Society, also served as the general secretary of Gengshen Youth Writing Association, won four literary awards, including modern poetry awards for National Student Literary Award and National Medical Student Literary Award ⁵. A person studying TCM, a person writing modern poetry, a person organizing youth gatherings, these three identities have no conflict on him, instead 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 suitable for opening a bookstore, so he opened a bookstore called "Reference Bookstore" (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 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—ran for city councilor and lost, the bookstore survived.

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

The Least Cool Year

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

It did not hold an entity conference. Changed to a Podcast, made forty-seven episodes in total. The team ran north, central, and south, interviewed eighteen seniors, held six old friend interviews ³⁵. A gathering standing on "face-to-face, distance-less, harshly deep dialogue," 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 entity gathering to a 47-episode Podcast. A festival with the faith of "gathering bloodless family," the last edition could only recognize each other through microphones.

The podcast description has this paragraph, explaining that year's situation accurately: "From the chaotic beginning of the year... when the world only had isolation as a path, Taiwan was fortunate to become a corner creature of the off-peak value, able to gather, meet, chat about possible futures." ³⁵ The word "corner creature" is used sadly and accurately. In 2020 the whole world was in lockdown, Taiwan was one of the few places still able to gather and meet, Complex Life Festival seized this gap, made it into a program about "how to recognize each other in an era of isolation."

The fifth edition previewed the sixth, saying they would draw a free suite for listeners ³⁵. But the sixth edition had no record of being held. The entity Complex Life Festival, substantially terminated in 2020. A gathering with gathering as faith, the last edition called Self-Isolation, then scattered—this ending, more than any deliberate design, looks like a metaphor of an era.

How to understand what this gathering of five years, about 1,500 people in total, left? Putting 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 first time going to the streets to participate in politics ³⁶. After the movement scattered, the energy of "out of the pass to sow seeds" divided into several exits: some entered the system to create the New Power Party, in 2016 won five legislative seats at once; some did citizen tech to create g0v, turning government data into tools everyone can use; some organized alternative education, grew into Asia's largest Za School. Complex Life Festival took the fourth path: not elections, not coding, not recruiting, 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 Complex Life Festival: Audrey Tang was the representative of the g0v line walking into the central government, Hsu Hao-ning himself represented the New Power Party running for office, Liu An-ting was the alternative education line—the energy diverging after 318, circled for four years, sat together again in that triangle facing away from the audience. Complex Life Festival's influence is not in scale, but in that moment of "recognizing kindred spirits," and quietly sewing these seemingly separate youth lines into the same room.

Ending: You Are Always Just a Little Bit Short

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

He first admitted an embarrassing thing: "Complex Life Festival is the most hated activity I ever organized, every year I verify if my faith is true or false. This year's attendees, will they not want to come next year?" ³ A festival warming others, the main organizer himself doubts every year if it can last. A person building a home for others, standing at the door himself, every year afraid no one will come back.

Then he told a paragraph, unveiling 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 out, to 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 paragraph解开 the mystery at the beginning. What is "unsuccessful"? It is not a humble term, Huang Dou-ni really went to Harvard, the humble term was already realized by reality. It is not entirely prophecy, this group's later "success" is too varied, cannot be summarized by an upward line. It is more like the state Hsu Hao-ning spoke of: a self-expectation worn on a generation, cannot be pulled off. Always feeling short by a little bit, never willing to say to themselves "I am good enough." Complex Life Festival turned this collective dissatisfaction into an annual gathering—a group a little bit short, mutually confirming they are indeed a little bit short.

Huang Dou-ni sealed it in "2016–2019 My Honor." Hsu Hao-ning stayed in Taichung, continuing to see TCM, continuing to care for that bookstore left after losing the election. In the fifth edition year, the world locked everyone into self-isolation, this festival with gathering as faith, in the year gathering was most impossible, quietly drew a period.

That unanswered question still remains 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 each returned to their respective complex lives, continuing to live a little bit short.

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

Further Reading:

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

Image Sources

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

• Complex Life Festival Scene (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 microphone, "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 three sofas arranged 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 scene. 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.
• "Shoe Stop Youth" Sign — Shoe removal sign outside the lecture room and a pair of soccer shoes. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Fourth Edition "M D F K" Main Visual — Huang Dou-ni hand-drawn motherfucker Zhuyin standard characters. Image: Huang Dou-ni Design / Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.

References