Underground Publications Surge Through Taiwan’s Campuses
學院湧現地下刊物風潮
Source: Underground Publications of the 1990s
From: Sounding Taiwan: An Exploration of Postwar Taiwan’s Sound Culture, pp. 170–171
Date: May 2015. Author: Yu Wei
In the aftermath of the Wild Lily Student Movement, censorship was lifted and ideological controls loosened; Taiwan’s universities and colleges began to see a wave of underground publications, including NTU’s Bitter People’s Report and Humanities Report, Fu Jen’s Sweet Honey, NTHU’s Toilet Paper and Dàbiàn Bào and the National Institute of the Arts’ Proclamation Report.
Among them, Excrement Report (founded 1993) was produced by the “Excrement Studio,” a group of NTHU students led by a person pseudonymously named Apple (Chia Wei-p’ing). Running until it folded in 1994, it published seven issues in total, each compiled from hand-drawn and collage-based text and imagery by different contributors — styled after strip-show posters, Hong Kong gossip magazines, and the manga weekly New Young Boy Express, with no small influence from early Western underground comics. In addition to circulating via mail-order gifting, it was serialised in Isle Margin magazine, inviting reader submissions of “dirty, disgusting, mysterious, lowbrow, pornographic, incomprehensible imagery.”
Underground publications had close ties to the noise movement: NTU’s Audio-Visual Society publication Bitter People’s Report was written by LTK Commune members Ts’ai Hai-en and K’o Jen-chien; Sweet Honey involved Zero Sound members. Two Excrement Report members also participated in Zero Sound’s 1994 performance “Howling Wind Whisper.”
Tags
Counterculture *Noise Magazine* Movement Underground Music Journal Independent Media DIY Culture Music Writing
External Links
- Intellectuals and a Bunch of Fearless Riffraff: Lin Ch’i-wei on Punk and Taiwan’s Student Movement Counterculture (Yu Wei)
- Excrement Report (Isle Margin)
- Introduction to Apple 38’s Little Comics: Comics on the Internet! (Apple 38 Little Comics)
- The Web 2.0 Era and Free Publications (Lo Chiao-wei)