Archiving Resistance: Cyberfeminism and Commons in Asia

The exhibition “www.counterarchive.commons” explores how to resist technological and cultural hegemony through feminist and decolonial perspectives within the framework of commons approaches. The exhibition is structured around three sub-themes: “AI Archive”, “Fragile Archive”, and “Corporeal Archive.” 

This event marks the first public discussion on the “Corporeal Archive” theme, featuring researcher Emily Shin-Jie Lee, open-source community organizers Ann Chen and Winnie Chen and artist Lee Tzu-Tung. They will share their artistic practices in the digital sphere, focusing on the intersection of art and the commons.

｜Date｜

Semptember 18 (Web.) 19:30-21:30

｜Moderator｜

Emily Hsiang-Yun Huan｜Curator

｜Panelist｜

• Emily Shin-Jie Lee｜Cultural Practitioner and Researcher  
• Ann Chen｜”Wikiwomen Taiwan” Organizer
• Winnie Chen｜”Wikiwomen Taiwan” Organizer
• Lee Tzu-Tung｜Artist

｜Agenda｜

19:30-19:35 

Opening Address: Exhibition Overview and Speaker Introduction

19:35-20:05 

Emily Shin-Jie Lee：Art Practice as Commoning Infrastructures 

20:05-20:35

Ann Chen & Winnie Chen：Creating a female co-creative space for knowledge sharing: The Wikiwomen Taiwan Experience

20:35-21:05 

 Lee Tzu-Tung：熱科技與冷復仇：數位賦權

21:05-21:35  

Discussion

｜Registration｜　https://forms.gle/4ewhoByMSyBfeuQN8

｜Panel Introduction｜

I.  Art Practice as Commoning Infrastructures 

This short talk shares several projects I participated in the Netherlands in recent years to explore the concept and method of “Commoning.” The talk further reflects on the relation between “Commoning” and the discourses of (Asian) feminist, (post) decolonial theory to question how art communities create "Commoning Infrastructures" to promote political and socio-cultural change.

II. Creating a female co-creative space for knowledge sharing: The Wikiwomen Taiwan Experience

Ann Chen and Winnie Chen, organisers of Wikiwomen Taiwan, will share their experiences in hosting community-friendly events. Wikiwomen Taiwan is centred around women, providing a comfortable and welcoming space for Wikipedia editing while fostering a collaborative and supportive writing environment.

Launched with their first meetup in 2015, Wikiwomen Taiwan aims to address gender bias on Wikipedia and encourage the participation of diverse gender groups in editing. The group is dedicated to highlighting topics and perspectives important to women. Through monthly editing gatherings, Wikiwomen Taiwan continually builds writing momentum and organises meetings with various themes (such as the Art + Feminism Edit-a-thon), allowing participants with different interests to contribute meaningfully.

III. 熱科技與冷復仇：數位賦權

Artist Lee Tzu-Tung will introduce her works “Forkonomy() ”, “Positive Coin”, and “Offline Wiki” and discuss how these works incorporate the spirit of open-source and decentralized technology in the technological community into the creation of participatory projects, thus enabling marginalized groups and protesters to practice alternative political influence in their artwork. Continuing on this theme, Lee will also briefly introduce “The Body’s Tale of Vengeance and Mercy,” a project to be shown in the exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which discusses how individuals can become stronger, more resilient, and more courageous in the networked digital world. In the face of cyber-bullying and emotional abuse, we will discuss how to fight back in a well-planned, calm and self-assured manner that best suits our demands.

｜About the Moderator｜

Emily Hsiang-Yun Huang 

黃祥昀 Emily Hsiang-Yun Huang is a researcher and visual artist from Taiwan. She holds a BA in Philosophy from National Taiwan University (TW) and an MA in Media Studies from Leiden University (NL). Her research interests focus on the relationship between body and technology from the perspective of postcolonialism, cyberfeminism and digital materialism. Projects she has curated include IMPAKT Festival-Our Terms, Our Conditions, Taipei Digital Art Festival-Fake It Real (2022), Embodied Interface (2020) and Uchronia (2020). 

As an artist, she often makes performance films derived from her poetry on the vulnerability of human and non-human existence, with a focus on the female body, in-between identity and the circularity of time. Her works have been exhibited at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cinedance Festival at the Eye Museum in Amsterdam, Roll Out Dance Film Festival in Macao, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade and Venice International Performance Art Week curated by the artistic duo VestAndPage as part of the Performance Art Program conceived by Marta Jovanović, among others. In 2022-2023, she received the Mondrian Artist Start Grant and exhibited her works at Rotterdam Art Week in 2024. 

@hsiangyun.zip 

@cloudscape_media_art

｜About the Panelists｜  

Emily Shin-Jie Lee 

Cultural practitioner and researcher based in Amsterdam. She studied anthropology at National Taiwan University and obtained her research master’s degree in art studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie in curatorial methods in art and social practice, institutional critique and cultural politics in contemporary art. Emily currently works at Framer Framed with a focus on art residencies and cross-institutional collaborations. Since 2022, she has been working on a PhD project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam, in which she studies art residency and its critical engagement with ecological, feminist and decolonial enquiries. Emily is one of the founding members of Lightbox, a public photo library and center for contemporary photography in Taipei; co-founder of Limestone Books, an art book store in Maastricht; and co-founder of Hide & Seek Audiovisual Art, a multidisciplinary collective focusing on cultural mediation and alternative pedagogy. 

Wikiwomen Taiwan

 "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." - Virginia Woolf 

Wikiwomen Taiwan, literally translated as 'A Room of WikiWomen's Own' in Mandarin, is a community initiated by Women in Free and Open Source Software in Taiwan (WoFOSS) and Wikimedia Taiwan (WMTW). Our goal is to create a friendly and supportive co-editing community for women, providing them with a free and comfortable space to collaborate and contribute. Female participation in the Wikimedia Movement's collaborative writing community is significantly lower than that of males. While achieving economic autonomy may not be as challenging for women in the contemporary era, having a comfortable and relaxing space remains essential at various stages of a woman's life. Openness does not mean nudity. In a cozy space, women of any age can freely contribute their observations. We warmly welcome you to join us!

Lee Tzu-Tung (they/them) 

Taiwanese conceptual artist and curator. Combining academic research with political activism, their work involves participatory processes, open-source ethos, and decentralised technologies. Growing up amid Taiwan's multifaceted generational identity struggle, their art practice questions how marginalised communities can 'queer-up' contemporary hegemonies after generational colonial traumas. As a political organiser, Lee hosted monthly conferences at Café Philo Chicago (2016–2018) and participated in NGO Overseas Taiwanese for Democracy, while serving as the leader and visual designer for a rally of 200 people Anti-Black Box Education (2016), 40 cities-wide rally Equality of Same-Sex Marriage (2016), and the organiser of the Indigenous protest Passage of Time (2016). Lee is the founder of Tinyverse NPO, which facilitates transdisciplinary, collaborative art projects, and is curator of Sensefield, an art and anthropology biennale.

Lee graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS) Art, Culture and Technology Program and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) Film, Video, Animation and New Media Program. Their work has been exhibited world-widely including the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MOCA Taipei (TW), MIT Museum (US), Lisbon University (PT), ArtScape (CA), Transmediale (DE), the Philosophers Stone Gallery (KR), and Hyundai Studio (CN)

Commoning 4 : www.counterarchive.commons
www.counterarchive.commons is a project whose name refers to a non-existent URL that transforms .com, which represents commercial companies, into .commons. Positioned at the intersections between open source culture, live/performance art, and internet/net art, the project explores how the concept of archive in the digital age can develop a methodology of commoning when it comes to the negotiation of the powers of "remembering" and "forgetting". Under the themes of fragile archive, corporeal archive, and AI archive respectively, we will discuss postcolonial sound art and internet archives in Latin America, non-western and open archives of cyberfeminism, and, finally, an expanded definition of archive as dataset, dealing with AI-generated misinformation, disinformation and data poisoning, where we will reflect on and imagine the future of machine unlearning and open-source art practices