Image credit: Provided by Nga Shi Yeu. Taken at the 2025 Taipei Biennial exhibition “Whispers on the Horizon”, from a sculptural artwork named “I Had Seen the Centuries, and the Vast Dry Lands; I Had Reached the Nothing, and the Nothing Was Living and Moist”, by Serbian artist Ivana Bašić. Appearing as a hybrid form—part creature, part machine—the sculpture evokes the afterlife and draws inspiration from praying mantis figures in ancient Greek and Egyptian cosmologies. The work resonates with themes of transformation as a condition of survival and rebirth, echoing how reproduction is reimagined as an experimental process of becoming.
This February issue invites three contributors to explore the shifting terrains of reproductive alternatives in Taiwan, at a moment when demographic anxieties, moral crises, and gender politics intersect in complex ways. Framed through the notion of “Zeroing Fertility”, these articles illustrate how fertility is variously intensified, channelled, and rendered unavailable through law, policy, and medical practice. Pei-Chieh Hsu traces the expansion of IVF subsidies to show how pronatalist governance recasts reproduction as a demographic technology and a site of state investment. Yu-Ying Hu follows Taiwanese lesbian women’s cross-border reproductive trajectories, foregrounding how legal exclusion gives rise to reproductive health precarity while demanding sustained logistical and affective labour. Yo-Ling Chen turns to ongoing Assisted Reproduction Act reforms to reveal how cisnormative legal categories continue to marginalise transgender reproductive possibilities, producing what can be read as a form of passive eugenics. Read together, these contributions suggest that fertility in Taiwan is not merely in decline but is actively recalibrated—strategically supported for some, while systematically foreclosed for others.
Subsidising Birth: Pronatalist Policy and the Rise of Assisted Reproductive Technologies Written by Pei-Chieh Hsu
Taiwan Insight 