Written by Meng Kit Tang. The piece examines how two recent Taiwanese comics: White Prison Shadows 2 (2025), grounded in Ye Shitao’s White Terror experiences, and White Rebellion 1 (2024), a speculative thriller; reveal the White Terror’s most enduring legacy: not the prison cell itself, but a “prison outside the prison” sustained through surveillance, social stigma, and internalized self-censorship.
Written by Ricarda Rodenas. This article describes Taiwan’s ongoing struggle over legal gender recognition, focusing on the continued requirement of sex-reassignment surgery to change one’s legal gender. It traces how pro-trans advocacy groups pursue litigation, public mobilisation, and international engagement, while facing an increasingly organised gender-critical countermovement and shifting populist currents. Despite Taiwan’s global reputation for marriage equality, the 2024 election reveals that trans rights remain politically marginal, with symbolic support outweighing substantive reform.
Written by Gahon Chiang. The northern concourse of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport’s Terminal 3 opened on 25 December 2025, signifying progress from martial law to democracy. This terminal’s design emphasises openness and passenger mobility, contrasting the enclosed layouts of earlier terminals. The evolution of the airport reflects Taiwan’s broader democratic transformation, reshaping citizen-state relations.
Written by Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley. This article shares insights from the new edition of The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media (2025), which documents a radically transformed, digitalised media ecology across the Chinese-speaking world. Comparing Taiwan, the PRC, Hong Kong and Macao, it foregrounds platform governance, power, participation and cultural negotiation, positioning Taiwan as a key lens for rethinking Chinese media studies in the digital age.
Written by Gita T. As Taiwan’s tourism sector continues to recover, questions about how the island should grow as a destination are beginning to resurface. This article advocates a slower model of heritage preservation, which allows a single site or landscape to open outward through observation, conversation, and carefully timed context. Taiwan does not start from zero as much preservation work is already underway.
Written by Chee-Hann Wu. This article reviews Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh’s 2025 Dia Beacon retrospective, tracing his durational performances that treat the body as a clock, from cages to time-clocking, and reflecting on the exhibition’s embodied, minimalist presentation that collapses art and life, revealing time as both medium and co-performer.
