Intensives in Action: Yu-Lun (Fiona) Hsu

As part of ICI's Intensives in Action series, Curatorial Intensive alum Yu-Lun (Fiona) Hsu reflects on her experience curating Not Just Love Stories (移動羅曼史), a long-term collaborative initiative examining the complex dynamics of transnational migration in Taiwan. Through deep community engagement, research, publishing, and public exhibitions and events, the project seeks to understand how migration and movement shape not only cultural aesthetics and artistic production, but also human relations on local, national, and global scales. Fiona developed the latest iteration of Not Just Loves Stories during the 2024 Curatorial Intensive in Indonesia; here, she discusses her process and the many intertwined elements that make up this dynamic project.

Not Just Love Stories (移動羅曼史) is a long-term curatorial initiative I’ve undertaken with photographer/art researcher Sherry Chang and literary researcher/social worker Sally Sung. Since 2020, the project has explored the aesthetics of a time of transnational mobility through research, fieldwork, documentation, community engagement, public events, exhibitions and publication. The project examines Taiwan's position within contemporary patterns of mobility, particularly as a destination for regional labor flows from Southeast Asia. Contemporary artists and writers, including Southeast Asian community members in Taiwan who maintain creative practices in writing, photography, dance, and music, have been involved in the project through exhibitions and publications. Through this specific lens, we explore broader questions about how transnational movements shape cultural aesthetics and artistic production in our globally mobile era. The project explores curatorship as a means to probe the potential political dynamics that emerge across communities and cultural borders, while contributing to wider discussions about the impact of the migratory, in both physical and conceptual senses, on contemporary art and cultural expression.

As the project title implies, Not Just Love Stories takes its curatorial inspiration from the prominence of romance writing in migrant literature among Taiwan’s Southeast Asian communities. “Affectivity” and “the migratory” serve as conceptual keywords of the initiative: They refer to the affinities among migrant communities—which includes and extends beyond romantic relationships, marriage, and family life—that reflect the complex lived realities shaped by transnational movement. The project also examines the affective registers of the arts and their potential to create alternative passages for cross-cultural and cross-community interactions outside of existing socio-political agendas.

Throughout five years, Not Just Love Stories has unfolded into many interconnected sub-projects with overlapping timelines.

The non-canonical: curatorial and artistic research (2020-2023)

Since the early 1990s, Taiwan's labor policies have created specific patterns of regional mobility, particularly through guest worker programs that bring workers from Southeast Asian countries—primarily Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines—for fixed-term contracts in the industrial, domestic care, and fishery sectors. This system of temporary, mobile labor reflects complex geopolitical dynamics and national identity issues in the region. Unlike many other East Asian economies, Taiwan's guest worker program exclusively focuses on Southeast Asian countries, a policy choice shaped by historical relations, political considerations, and ongoing cross-strait tensions with China.

This policy framework fundamentally shapes how Southeast Asian migrant worker communities—one among various Southeast Asian communities in Taiwan, including students, professionals, and long-term residents—are perceived within Taiwanese society. While public discourse often reduces their presence to temporary labor status, these communities have developed diverse forms of cultural expression that suggest alternative ways of understanding their experiences. Our curatorial attention to these aesthetic practices emerges from such context, seeking to explore self-determined forms of expression and representations from within these communities themselves.

Our curatorial research began by exploring literary works by Southeast Asian authors in Taiwan, with particular attention to romance literature submitted to Taiwan's Literature Awards for Migrants. We examined not only writing styles and themes but also how these works reflect social realities. Our research extended to writers’ self-organized initiatives—their online networks, self-publishing efforts, and promotional activities, considering their multifaceted roles as authors, narrators, and readers in romance genres. We also analyzed media representations and popular culture portrayals to understand how these communities’ experiences and affects are represented in Taiwan’s broader cultural landscape. 

Indonesian eateries in Taiwan often serve as wedding photography venues for their fellow migrants. Pictured is one such location in Chiayi, central Taiwan. (Photo: Sally Sung)

Field research brought us to sporadic locations across Taiwan where communities gather— shelters, fishing villages, Muslim prayer rooms, and workers’ dormitories—and to communal events such as regular gatherings, wedding ceremonies, and wedding photo shoots. From this very early stage, we began engaging artists who developed their research interests. For example, visual artist Cheng Jen-Pei conducted artistic workshops with community members, while artist Wei Ze focused her research on undocumented children born to undocumented working parents in Taiwan—a complex issue that reveals gaps in healthcare access and citizenship rights.  

Underlying this research phase is our intention to surface alternative, non-canonical narratives that emerge from within the communities, particularly through intimate settings and personal life moments. These narratives, grounded in personal experiences and emotional connections, challenge mainstream representation and discourse. We began to reflect on how art can function as a critical medium for amplifying marginalized voices and enabling polyphonic representation, recognizing the humanity that often gets obscured in broader geopolitical discussions.

The Relay: Wanita Tanpa Nama (A Woman Without a Name) — A Collective Writing Project (2021-2024)

This collective writing project investigates the concept of the “relay” in terms of collaborative efforts, paying particular attention to the ruptures and interstices that emerge in the act of translation—both linguistic or cultural. It also examines how re-readings, reinterpretations, and reworkings can serve as potential leaps across cultural gaps, revealing the dynamic tensions between language and meaning.

Relay writing—a practice where participants contribute sequentially to an evolving narrative—has become a significant practice within both Taiwan's migrant writing communities and among Taiwanese writers, particularly through online platforms. For migrant writers, these digital spaces enable collaboration despite work schedule constraints, while for Taiwanese writers, they serve as creative writing exercises. This project brings together four authors: Taiwanese writers Gemini Yang, or Yang Shuang-zi, and Hsiao Chun-Yi, and Indonesian authors Evi Agustika and Tari Sasha; the latter two began their literary careers in Taiwan while working as caregivers.

This writing experiment introduced a twist to the relay writing format. The four authors alternated writing in sequence—an Indonesian author, then a Taiwanese author, and so forth—drawing on elements from the preceding author’s romantic short story to develop new narratives, thereby intertwining their different cultural and linguistic frameworks.

The Spectrum: Art Residency in a Shopping Mall (2022-2024)

Located in Taipei’s Little Manila district, the Wan Wan building served as the site for an experimental art residency spanning from 2022 to 2024. This district was developed during the Japanese colonial period, thrived in the 1960s as a hub for foreign goods trading following the U.S. military presence during the Cold War, and has more recently become a key weekend gathering place for Filipino migrant workers. Its mall houses a diverse array of import shops and essential businesses such as beauty salons, remittance services, labor agencies, and Filipino food stalls. Many of the shop owners are Filipino immigrants, and it is common to find migrant workers running side businesses within the mall on weekends, contributing to the vibrant, fluid nature of the space.

Among the curatorial team, we often refer to Wan Wan's interior as a “kaleidoscope,” reflecting the shifting, transient nature of the community it serves. The space embodies a cultural fusion of displaced objects and people, continuously in motion, creating traces of temporary settlement. Over the course of three years, we transformed ourselves into shop owners, using our space within the mall as a curatorial base and workspace. From this vantage point, we hosted meetings, study groups, private and public screenings, and conducted fieldwork both inside and outside the shop.

Central to this residency was the collaboration with three artists to engage the community and deepen our research into the affective dimensions of migration and cultural displacement. Each artist brought distinct practices and perspectives, with two engaging in the residency for two consecutive years to develop long-term, immersive projects.

The intertwined: Elsewhere, within Now—a group exhibition (2024/04-05)

The group exhibition Elsewhere, within Now evolved from the five-year trajectory of Not Just Love Stories, involving thirteen artists and weaving together intersected narrative threads within the exhibition space through six key works that shaped these narrative pathways.

I joined the Curatorial Intensive one month before the exhibition’s opening in April and May 2024. Insights from the program prompted me to re-engage with the artists and curatorial team, expanding the exhibition’s scope to challenge communal, cultural, and institutional hierarchies in cultural production. The aim was to question the inherent structures in artistic production and cultural capital, exploring how the migratory—now in its geographical, physical, bodily, emotional, and discursive dimensions—could illuminate ways to disrupt and blur these frameworks. Recognizing that this exhibition marked the first contemporary art participation for all Southeast Asian artists involved, we further schemed a series of events led by artists, community members, and curators ourselves with an aim to deepen the intersections between artistic production and migrant experiences and to form micro and macro publics. The exhibition also served as a testament to the relationships cultivated over five years of community engagement. Our neighbors from the Wan Wan building, whom we first met as shopkeepers and community members, became collaborators and cultural mediators in the exhibition. For instance, our Wan Wan neighbor KK guided tours, sharing intimate knowledge of the neighborhood and its transformation while offering unique perspectives on the art project through personal experiences.

Not Just Love Stories has set out to be an outlook for alternation, and has extended beyond traditional exhibition formats through multiple platforms after the group exhibition period: "JALUR BEBAS: Path of Freedom Music Festival," featuring migrant worker bands; traveling exhibitions at the New Immigrants Hall in Southern Taiwan; and "Zine Wan Wan," a literary-visual zine for the community. A second anthology, Selengket Padi Pulut (Sticky as Glutinous Rice), co-authored by Taiwanese and Indonesian writers, is forthcoming in 2025. These initiatives transform Not Just Love Stories into an ongoing cultural action, creating spaces for dialogue between art, migration, and society as opportunities arise. It continues to write itself into existence—each participant a co-author, each voice adding to this collective narrative that remains deliberately open, inviting new perspectives and possibilities to emerge.

Intensives in Action programs showcase how alumni of our flagship professional development program, the Curatorial Intensive, have brought their Intensive proposals to life. The Curatorial Intensive has, since 2010, taken place in more than 25 cities around the world and engaged almost 500 international curators. During the program, participants develop proposals for exhibitions, research, programs, or other projects through intensive study, with the guidance of international mentors, and in conversation with a cohort of peers.

Encompassing tours, texts, talks, and other content, Intensives in Action programming highlights the work and process of Curatorial Intensive alumni through the lens of these proposals, the projects they become, and the many dynamic career trajectories they shape.