化為燈籠，革命藝術 — jonCates (2025)
become Lanterns, transform Art — jonCates (2025)
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張舫涵 Chang Fang Han (Toast), Taiwanese artist-curator
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張舫涵 Chang Fang Han (Toast) focuses on Art-Science as she creates and curates. The “Sensory Circuits” exhibition that she curated began as a reflection on 萬華區 (Wanhua), the oldest district in Taipei, and became a pilgrimage during 青山王祭 (The Qing Shan King Sacrificial Ceremony), an annual night festival of Taiwanese Temple culture. In Taiwan, temple ceremonies are often celebrations. These public parties are loud and vibrant cacophonies of sounds and different music simultaneously celebrating the gods who are brought outside their temples on processions to visit their neighborhoods. The word for this distinctly cultural value of loud-happy-social-sound is 熱鬧.
Toast takes this opportunity to build her own interactive wearable artwork which listens and converts sound to light and color. She carefully hand-codes and crafts her work with accessible materials. Her lightweight open-source microcontroller LED system can be worn. Through layers of thin plastic, it casts and amplifies the glow of sounds around her. During 燈節 (Lantern Festival), almost any light-emitting source becomes a ‘lantern.’ Toast herself becomes a lantern, walking out of the cyberpunk visions that inspire her into the neon-lit nights of the 西門 (Ximen) and 北門 (Beimen) neighborhoods. Her science background in computer simulation continues to inspire her art. She explores and experiments with small-scale technologies which allow her to work in public, moving easily into the streets, taking her work and research into direct contact and communication with those who she meets.
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鄭佳鳳 Gahon C. (Glory Cheng), Taiwanese artist-teacher
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鄭佳鳳 Gahon C. (Glory) explores recombining and recontextualizing her own work from past to the present, from different times in her life, searching deeper spiritual connections. Her process is a form of self-portrait. The character she created over 10 years ago appears now, not in the original context of a childrens book that she wrote, but instead as an iconic representation of her younger self. As she says, she is seeking her center, her core, to move forward. She makes decisions by artistic intuition as well as through careful aesthetic planning and thoughtful reflection. In this way, she creates Digital Art and Glitch Art that are informed by her Painting and Drawing incorporating filmmaking and experimental music.
At the Taipei Lantern Festival, Glory ingeniously carried her work inside a simple, clear plastic bag. This classic style of Taiwanese take-away is omnipresent on the streets of Taipei, as people purchase and carry bubble tea inside transparent sealed plastic cups, which they then carry in plastic bags. The Digital Art display screen carried in a plastic bag is a perfect form of 外帶 (carry out), communicating that Art is part of life and cannot be contained inside rarified or gatekept cultural spaces. Art goes with us wherever we go. Glory’s Glitch Art, the Art of Surprise, also takes casual viewers by surprise because while the presentation in a plastic bag seems casual it is of course extremely intentional and unusual to see, sparking people’s interest and curiosity.
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Sue Su Su, Taiwanese artist && cultural anthropologist
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Sue Su Su works with archives from their perspective as a artist && cultural anthropologist. Their art draws from the preservation of media and cultures in film archives and sound libraries such as the 臺大總圖書館 (National Taiwan University Library). Sue Su Su creates new Media Art by combining moments sampled from Taiwan’s many different eras. Digging through Taiwan’s complex hystories like a dj or an archaeologist, Sue Su Su transmits multiplied layers of meaning simultaneously. The significance of these layers of hystories are expressed through both the form && content of the medium-specific materials. Like the strata we see in rock formations, where subtle gradations show the passage of time and major events, Sue Su Su’s work reveals recent hystories of Taiwan, with its now vibrant direct democracy (since 1992), after the police-state of the 國民黨 (KMT) and colonial period of imperial Japan before that.
Sue Su Su searches through all of these earlier moments to arrive at the present during the 2025 Lantern Festival in Taipei, Taiwan. When you listen to the soundscape they carry, you hear prayers, scriptures, love songs, and Sound Art. Glitches and material texture from the physical qualities of 78 records — skips, surface noise, deterioration — and file formats become more than aesthetics. They embodying the fragility && persistence of cultural memories that are waiting while transforming as we listen. As SueSuSu says, the cinematic idea, drawing from their filmmaking expertise, is to create the feeling of ‘hearing a broken radio catching different frequencies between unstable stations, a radio that is Taiwan.’
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Joyfully unofficial, these three Taiwanese artists take a permissionlessness pilgrimage through the 2025 Lantern Festival in Taipei. In their journey, they share their work openly with all they meet along the way, embodying the free spirit of going outside — where Art lives unrestricted by boundaries or gatekeepers. They are not just carrying their art; they become lanterns themselves, illuminating the way forward.
化為燈籠，革命藝術 (become Lanterns, transform Art) at the 2025 Lantern Festival && Digital Art in 台北，台灣 (Taipei, Taiwan) with artists 張舫涵 Chang Fang Han (Toast), 鄭佳鳳 Gahon C. (Glory Cheng), and Sue Su Su, written && reviewed by jonCates
