This year's conference on "MIT (Made-in-Taiwan), Redux: New Approaches to Material and Technological Cultures in Taiwan" is presented as part of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative, a partnership of UCLA and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) that aims to create research synergies to promote cutting-edge research in Taiwan studies.
The UCLA Asia Pacific Center (APC) presented its eighth UCLA-NTNU Annual Taiwan Studies Initiative Conference, “MIT (Made-In-Taiwan), Redux: New Approaches to Material and Technological Cultures in Taiwan,” on Friday and Saturday, May 2-3, 2025. The event was organized by Shu-mei Shih (Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA) and Raymond Kun-Xian Shen (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA). This conference invited scholars to critically reflect on technical objects and production culture in Taiwan materially, socio-historically, and philosophically. Fourteen speakers, including two from NTNU, presented their work in six panels convened over the two days, with additional scholars participating as moderators or opening speakers.
Conference co-organizer Shu-mei Shih delivers opening remarks.
Day 1 of the conference began with opening remarks from the organizers, Vice Provost Cindy Fan, NTNU International Taiwan Studies Director Nikky Lin, and APC Interim Director Andrea S. Goldman. Moderated by Andrea S. Goldman (UCLA), Panel 1 focused on "Dreaming of Robots and Computers." Honghong Tinn (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) presented on constructed images of Taiwanese companies as invaders and counterfeiters, portrayed by the US media and congressional hearings participants in the late summer of 1983. Ching Hung (National Chung Cheng University) provided a unique look into Taiwan’s first—and likely only—locally created sci-fi comic robot, the protagonist of the highly popular comic series The Robot (1950–1970), created by renowned cartoonist Liu Hsing-Chin (劉興欽), revealing how Taiwanese culture has historically prioritized the everyday usefulness and accessibility of science and technology over innovation or cutting-edge breakthroughs. Kuan-Hung Lo (University of Maryland College Park) examined the designs produced by Taiwanese robotics teams to explore how roboticists integrate their notions about materials from everyday life into their artificial creatures and how their cultural values and perceptions shape these choices.
Panel 1 (from left to right): Andrea S. Goldman, Honghong Tinn, Ching Hung, and Kuan-Hung Lo
Panel 2 turned to the theme of "Building Infrastructure and Communities" and was moderated by Nikky Lin (NTNU). Anru Lee (City University of New York) told the story of 25 unwed factory women who died in a ferry incident in 1973, interrogating how the affect associated with an industrial structure of feeling was mobilized to create subjects and practices commensurable with capital accumulation at the time of these women’s death when Taiwan was at the peak of its export industrial economy. Kuang-Chi Hung (National Taiwan University) shed light on a period in Taiwan's history (1960s-1980s) when it exported a vast array of wooden products (including everyday household items such as plates, pepper shakers, and salt containers) and examines these lesser-known MIT (Made-in-Taiwan) products as a starting point to connect them to Taiwan’s forestry policies during the Cold War. Tosti Hsu-Cheng Chiang (NTNU) leveraged AI technology to identify and analyze fake news through linguistic features and writing styles, demonstrating that the implementation of a news source credibility identification system could enhance public sensitivity to the reliability of sources as well as foster media literacy in the long term to achieve a synergistic effect where technology could be used to combat fake news.
Panel 2 (from left to right): Nikky Lin, Anru Lee, Kuang-Chi Hung, and Tosti-Hsu-Cheng Chiang
Panel 3 showcased a special artist presentation by Yu Hsin Su (Artist-in-Residence, 18th Street Arts Center) on “Water: A Geoarchive." Su first presented a video work, Particular Waters (18 min, 38 sec). This research-based fiction film departs from the headquarters of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in Hsinchu and examines how TSMC and the science park reshaped the local hydraulic order. In the film, the protagonist is a female truck driver transporting water from other areas to the factory - as TSMC did during the drought induced by climate change in 2021 - and back to the banks of the Toucian River. However, the driver disobeys her instructions - performing an act of resistance for the actual benefit of humans and nature. Su then spoke on her artistic research on the water-intensive semiconductor industry in Hsinchu and Phoenix. Taking an environmental focus, she underscored the complexity of global semiconductor supply chains from the perspective of water and energy infrastructure. Through an environmental kin study of the drought experienced in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and Phoenix, US, her research unveiled water’s double role: as a carrier of the past and a cipher for silicon-driven human ambition.
Panel 3:Yu Hsin Su, Artist and Filmmaker
Day 2 of the conference commenced in the early morning. Moderated by Veronica Paredes (UCLA), Panel 4 featured three presentations on "Visualizing Cold War Taiwan." Joseph Ho (Albion College) reconstructed the lives and tactile experiences of Taiwan-based amateur photographers from the early 1950s through the 1970s, agencies of camera ownership and localized photographic technologies, and contextual media as material translations of imagination, imparting fresh views of the artifact-based processes and traces of image-making as memory-making, reframing both martial law existences and historical perceptions of Taiwan in the world. Chang-Min Yu (National Taiwan University) examined "pictorial publicity" shorts on Taiwan produced between 1957-1962 (which were meant as an unofficial promotion of foreign interests in mass media to influence American public opinion), and traced a screened history of Formosa for Americans, positing that these images of Taiwan had always played an instrumental role in greasing the gears of American aid (first through the Joint Commission of Rural Reconstruction, the Wright Foundation, and the National Science Foundation). Evelyn Shih (University of Colorado Boulder) presented a pre-recorded talk focusing on focus on the achievements of documentarian Chang Chao-tang, as well as author Huang Chun-ming, who led the charge to fund and air the series Fragrant Formosa on CTV, and who became a collaborator with Chang in the role of director; Chang and Huang maximized the extra-linguistic aspects of the televisual form to reach out to the senses of the Taiwanese home audience, embracing the new medium as a mode of collective experience.
Panel 4 (from left to right): Joseph Ho, Chang-Min Yu, and Veronica Paredes
Moderated by Raymond Kun-Xian Shen, Panel 5 turned attention to "Sounding Contemporary Taiwan." Meredith Schweig (Emory University) examined Taiwan's participation in global hip-hop culture through the lens of music technology manufacturing, as well as the relations between local hip-hop practices and Taiwan's role in global music technology supply chains. Raymond Kun-Xian Shen (UCLA) explored the intricate and paradoxical relationship between cassette tapes, musical piracy, and the modernization of Taiwan’s popular music industry in the 1980s.
Panel 5 (from top to bottom): Meredith Schweig and Raymond Kun-Xian Shen
Following lunch, Panel 6, moderated by Jasmine Nadua Trice (UCLA), featured presentations on the theme: “Of Affect and Environment.” Pei-Chun Viola Hsieh (NTNU) presented an archaeology of If Narratives Become Great Flood by the sonic artist and visual artist Liu Yu, shaping her analysis in the form of inquiry into its production process, its cultural-historical referents and its audiovisual metamorphosis; Hsieh posits that Liu’s plastic artistic strategy reconfigures the myth of the flood as a living organism in an effort to reclaim the vitality of nature and its political potency—both of which have long been undermined by modernization. Belinda Qian He (University of Maryland, College Park) provided an opportunity to rethink women’s troubling relationships with nature, ghosts, and machines through the lens of labor and fieldwork, and explored how an idea of undomesticated justice becomes enmeshed in the ongoing, dynamic interplay among women’s lifeworld, nature, and the underworld—ultimately reclaiming the wild, a blurred confluence of the more-than-human and the undead, as feminist space and a mode of thinking by doing. Finally, Jane Hu (University of Southern California) presented her paper on the work of Taiwanese American writer Tao Lin, focusing on his last two novels Taipei (2013) and Leave Society (2021) as both a product and expression of Taiwan’s semiperipheral status, and addressed the question of what makes Lin's literary productions "Taiwanese."
Panel 6 (from left to right): Belinda Qian He, Jane Hu, Pei-Chun Viola Hsieh, and Jasmine Nadua Trice
Shu-mei Shih, conference co-organizer, moderated a concluding forum to close this eighth UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Conference. The initial discussion touched upon the difficulty in thinking about technology in Taiwan without falling into the trap of techno-instrumentalism, wherein things may get 'made in Taiwan' but do not acquire a distinct Taiwanese identity, and when they do acquire some distinct qualities, they tend to fall into certain stereotypes. Furthermore, visualizations of the future are often portrayed in an oversimplified manner, having cut out the human element and leaving the microchip or the robot in its place. Presenters and attendees alike actively chimed in with their thoughts and reflections, generating a well-rounded conversation and ongoing considerations about the diverse possibilities and definitions of "Made-In-Taiwan." This annual conference continues to serve as a cornerstone of APC’s vibrant Taiwan Studies Program and strengthen the relationship between UCLA and NTNU since the inception of the initiative in 2017.
Shu-mei Shih moderates a concluding forum and Q&A, following the final panel of the conference.
Published: Friday, May 30, 2025
