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 organizers 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 Tou-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 talk of "growth" but forbidding talk 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; visual assistant Huang Tou-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 step into various forms of success, and its sharpest question remains the one 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 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 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 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 campus 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 Hsu Hao-ning.

Six months 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: seeing "unsuccess" from a different distance, and asking if it also has its own appearance.

To understand the story, these two must be placed in different positions, as later narratives often confused them. Huang Yen-lin studied Western medicine (Medical Department); Hsu Hao-ning studied Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM Department). 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: "Department Edge" (Xi Bian) — being an outsider in one's own department, with minds not focused on where the white coat should go ⁵. This self-description is important; it signifies an active stance of stepping to the margins. 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 list of names on Facebook. The tagging criteria were strange: he sought people who fit the keywords "post-80s, continuous workaholic, repeated practice, department edge, 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 very tiring." 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 couldn't stay in their own departments recognizing each other.

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

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

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

Almost every person in Taiwan has heard of the "Simple Life Festival." Founded in 2006 by Jonathan Lee, Chang Pei-jen, and Ma Tian-zong, a group of Rock Records musicians, its main slogan was "Do what you like, make what you like valuable," with an aura of "calm and focused" ⁶. It grew from 30,000 attendees in the first edition to 60,000–100,000 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 was a carefully designed "simplicity." Ten years later, for its 20th anniversary, it invited Wu Bai and Jonathan Lee to share the stage ⁶, having long turned 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 yearning for a simple and beautiful life, then we have a group of workaholics who always make life very tiring; 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 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 "life should look like this" definition set by the previous generation for them. The "simplicity" of the Simple Life Festival is an elegant threshold: it assumes you are already settled, so you have the leisure to pursue simplicity. But this group hasn't even achieved settlement. Picking up words with originally derogatory connotations like "complex," "unsuccessful," "workaholic," and "department edge" 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-hsiung wrote The Disaffected Generation (Yan Shidai), defining them as "those aged 20 to 34, born with mice in their mouths, possessing the best qualities Taiwan has ever seen, yet facing low wages, poverty, and a future that cannot be seen" 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 the generation with regressing starting salaries and no visible future, these two things squeezed into the same group.

Going further back, in 2011, the Taiwan Labor Front published The Collapsed Generation (Beng Shidai), discussing the same group facing corporate consolidation and impoverishment. Earlier was "22K," referring to the Ministry of Education's internship program for college graduates in response to the 2008 financial crisis (2009–2011), with a monthly salary of NT$22,000 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, pushing down this generation's starting salaries for several years ⁸.

Losers (Lu Sheng), Strawberries, Disaffected Generation, Collapsed Generation, 22K. What the Complex Life Festival did was 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 reclaiming the power of naming — 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 that perfectly annotated the whole gathering: It's too hard to be simple, let's explore complexity together ⁹.

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

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

The first edition had thirty groups of speakers, cutting across the post-80s independent creation 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, 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 which were positions mainstream industries cared about, but everyone was doing them seriously.

A speaker shares in front of the projection screen, with the Complex Life Festival's signature pixel dot-matrix banner hanging on the wall. 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, in 2017, was themed "Hotel California." This edition really 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 meant something different — it described a group of people who found their kind in each other, and once inside, could never leave, because there was no other place outside where they could speak like this. A metaphor of "entering but not leaving," Huang Tou-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 this point, the Complex Life Festival had its own shape. Za School (The School for a Better Taiwan) grew into Asia's largest educational carnival; "Teach For Taiwan" followed an organized talent recruitment path; the Complex Life Festival deliberately maintained a size 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 Pan-Knowledge Festival in an article on "knowledge entertainment," self-segregating 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. The Complex Life Festival chose to stay where the spotlight couldn't reach; 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 200,000–300,000人次; but for the Complex Life Festival, "small" was a deliberate choice, not a sign of not growing up. It wanted that density where everyone could talk to everyone; once amplified, 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 New Year." ¹³

The Triangle Facing Away from the Audience

The "Shoe Stop Youth" sign and soccer ball outside the lecture room. The Complex Life Festival held deep conversations like in someone else's living room; taking off shoes before entering, this small action 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 the subtitle as a question: "Why complicate when you could be simple?" ¹⁴ "Buddhist" was the buzzword of those two years, describing a lying-flat mindset of "whatever, doesn't matter, no strong desire." The Complex Life Festival using it as a theme was itself a rhetorical question: a group of workaholics who made life very tiring 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 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 a 59:59 countdown clock. The countdown clock is the 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 Digital Minister of the Executive Yuan; Liu An-ting, 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 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 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 Complex Life Festival's temperament: 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-free and nearly苛刻 (harsh) 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 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, 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, while 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 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 figure it 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 Taiwan's most promising generation of this era, talking about "innovation comes from the margins" — while the audience sat were those who thought they were on the margins, but later one by one stepped 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 the government and margins, such a nonsensical question appeared, and Audrey Tang seriously took it. This image is actually very "Complex Life Festival" — it allows harsh depth and youthful nonsense to coexist, because these two things are actually the same thing for this group.

The speakers at the third edition were not just these three. There was also Lei Ya-qi, editor-in-chief of Pan-Science; Dr. Lang Quan, who did 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 see that the Complex Life Festival never invited people for fame. It invited people who were "seriously doing something no one understood yet," with fame being 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 footnote 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 three-way dialogue. She founded "Teach For Taiwan" to send teachers to rural 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 Exchange Coupons

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

During the day at China Medical University was the serious dialogue site, triangle, countdown clock, 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, alcohol was exchanged for "Cocktail Exchange" coupons.

The "Villager Pass" and "Cocktail Exchange" coupons of the Complex Life Village, with geometric dot-matrix font design being the Complex Life Festival's visual signature. 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 Si Guan in Fengjia; the whole space was soaked in that dot-matrix font visual language. This pixel aesthetic was not randomly chosen. Dot-matrix fonts are the fonts of early computers, early game consoles; they are the screen memories of this post-80s generation when they were children. Using them for a 2018 youth gathering is saying: we are the generation that 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, exchange 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, 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 most unreplicable thing about the Complex Life Festival.

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 by Facebook were a group with cultural capital, who could afford college, and had social connections in the independent creation circle. Its screening mechanism (friends tagging friends) naturally excluded another group: migrant workers in factories, same-age peers who didn't go to college, the truly marginalized post-80s 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 geographical layer. All five editions were held in Taichung; speakers and participants were mostly from the central Taiwan circle, keeping it far from the post-80s of the south and east. 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 "kind" of the Complex Life Festival was actually kind with a geographical radius.

This is a structure that such gatherings cannot avoid; it doesn't need to be treated as smearing. A gathering operating on "echo chamber deep exchange" is essentially different from "the overall face of the post-80s." 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 solving it. Knowing your gathering is selective, and organizing a gathering that is not selective, there is the weight of the entire structure in between.

📝 Curator's Note
Spreading out the participant list of the "Unsuccessful People's Forum" reveals an awkward fact: this group, who called themselves unsuccessful, later disproportionately stepped into elite positions. Huang Tou-ni went to Harvard; speaker Audrey Tang became a minister; Liu An-ting won international education awards. 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, no visible future, marginalization in their own departments were all immediate realities. The problem is not whether they later became successful, but that this gathering could only hold "unsuccessful people on the way to success" from the beginning. 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 academic eyes, in 2019, someone used French philosopher Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" to explain the Complex Life Festival ¹⁹. Heterotopia refers to spaces between reality and utopia, both real and illusory, squeezing heterogeneous elements together, thus bursting with the potential to disturb reality. Foucault's examples are gardens, cemeteries, theaters, ships; these places are within the daily, yet follow another set of rules. The author's observation was 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 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 the Complex Life Festival as a 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 last for the 363 days after the gathering ends?

Two days and one nights of same-type gatherings; after the gathering, everyone 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 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 insiders" 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 understand Zhuyin and can spell it back to English can solve; that is, a wink only for Taiwanese, and a specific generation of Taiwanese. Huang Tou-ni personally designed this set of hand-drawn standard Zhuyin symbols, setting the tone as "being disciplined while talking boundless nonsense" ²¹, a youthful jargon only the echo chamber understands. 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," which is exactly the 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 those grid-like honeycomb rooms ²⁰. Choosing this building had its reason. First Plaza is an old building full of Southeast Asian migrant worker life traces; on weekends, it is 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 New Year." "Deep dialogue, distance-free and nearly harsh deep dialogue, is the signature of the 'Complex Life Festival'." "We go further together." ¹³

Calling a gathering "New Year," calling participants "family without blood ties," is the most moving and most dangerous self-positioning of the Complex Life Festival. New Year is once a year, with fixed seats, the whole family returning to the same table; comparing this same-type 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, the New Year table has a seat limit — those who can return to celebrate New Year are always those originally on this family list.

Soul Stays in the Margins, Assistant Goes to Harvard

To understand whose the Complex Life Festival was, you must look at where these two organizers 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 cypherpunk spirit into Taiwan's digital society." ²² This sentence reads like a resume, but拆开 (taken apart) is a huge turn: letting go of the resident physician position at Taipei Veterans General Hospital to chase something called "cypherpunk," a group who believed cryptography and code could redistribute power and protect individual freedom. He abandoned medicine not in 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, from the edge of the department to outside the department, then to a world completely unrelated to medicine.

After leaving, he co-founded FAB DAO, an organization using blockchain for public welfare, later launching "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 systems engineer, bringing the experience accumulated from doing web3 public welfare in the private sector into the government's room; in 2025, he again received the Harvard Kennedy School Allen Lab "Democracy Renovation" non-resident policy researcher position ². From a person responsible for posters and visual promotion at a small Taichung gathering, to the table discussing how to reshape democracy at Harvard — this trajectory is almost the most dramatic realization of "innovation comes from the margins," just not realized by Liu An-ting who said it, but by the visual assistant who sat in the audience that year.

But regarding whose work the Complex Life Festival was, Huang Tou-ni himself spoke clearly. He wrote in his own article: "Complex reasonably becomes Hao-ning's creation; we exist as visual assistants 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 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.

When the fourth edition was held, 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 operations." ²⁶ The phrase "Facebook fan page operations difficulties" points to a structural turning point of the era — the Complex Life Festival grew up relying on Facebook tagging and Facebook fan pages; when Facebook's algorithm continuously lowered organic reach, this gathering relying on social organic connection also lost its oxygen.

Then came the sentence like a farewell, like an archive: "The four years, the things Complex taught me are probably about 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

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 High School, then entered the TCM Department of China Medical University, and is now the director of a TCM clinic in Beitou 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 passed away when he was in his senior year; at that time, his sister was a junior, his brother was a sophomore; 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 background color understanding why he stayed — a person who lost both parents during six years of college and carried a family, has a different weight for the thing "staying in place and holding things together."

He is still a poet. The founding president of the China Medical University Literature and Art Research Society, also served as the general secretary of the Gengshen Youth Writing Association, won four literary awards, including modern poetry awards at the National Student Literary Award and the National Medical Student Literary Award ⁵. A person studying TCM, a person writing modern poetry, a person organizing youth gatherings; 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 Shudian) 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, but the bookstore survived.

In 2018, Hsu 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 overdrawn by over 100,000 ³². When he ran, he said a very special sentence: "I hope I can love people, to prove that I was loved by great people." ³³ A young person who just lost his parents, wanting to use the thing "loving others" to prove that those who loved him truly existed — this sentence turned a public act like running for election into a very private mourning. He also said he would contribute his "golden years from 30 to 50" to Beitou ³⁴. He lost, but that bookstore, opened because he looked for a campaign headquarters, remained. A person wanting 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 same-types." In 2020, COVID arrived. A gathering whose core was "gathering family without blood ties to come home for New Year," collided with a year when the whole world had to keep 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 old friend interviews 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隔著 (through) 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 belief of "gathering family without blood ties" could only recognize each other隔著 (through) the microphone 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, 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" is used with both sadness and accuracy. In 2020, the whole world was in lockdown; Taiwan was one of the few places where gatherings and meetings were still possible; 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 gathering as its faith, the last edition called Self-Isolation, then scattered — this ending, more than any deliberate design, is like a metaphor of an era.

How to understand what this gathering, held for five years, with 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 participated in politics on the streets for the first time ³⁶. After the movement scattered, the energy of "out of the pass, sowing seeds" divided 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 did 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 same-age group 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 flowing out 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 scale, but in that moment of "recognizing same-types," 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 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 warming others for warmth, the main organizer himself doubts every year if it can last. A person building a home for others stands at the door, every year fearing no one will return.

Then he told a paragraph, 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, I'm 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 paragraph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 realized by reality. It is also not entirely a 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-demand worn by a generation, cannot be pulled 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 a little bit short, mutually confirming that they are indeed a little bit short.

Huang Tou-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 its faith, in the year gathering was least possible, quietly drew a period.

The question no one answered 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 the Complex Life Festival: how that 2014 movement, after scattering on the streets, divided into the New Power Party, g0v, Za School, and Complex Life Festival youth exits
• Za School — The same wave of 318 alternative energy, took the opposite path: grew 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-tasking
• FAB DAO and Project % — Where Huang Tou-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 the Complex Life Festival site and main visual designs, all cached in public/article-images/society/ to avoid hot-linking to source servers. The Complex Life Festival is a discontinued non-commercial youth activity, with no CC/PD authorized 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 published, small citation proportion, no substantial market substitution); sources are all activity records published by member teams (Huang Tou-ni) on Medium and third-edition site observation articles.

• Complex Life Festival Site (Cover) — Two participants looking at 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 speakers, speakers and audience mixed. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• Complex Life Festival Speaker Sharing — Speaker sharing in front of 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 Exchange" coupons, geometric dot-matrix font design. Photo: Complex Life Festival. Fair use editorial commentary.
• "Shoe Stop Youth" Sign — Shoe removal sign and soccer ball outside the lecture room. 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