New Zealand Brothers Taking an Experimental Path Through the Arts

Liu Yingfeng　/　photos Chuang Kung-ju　/　tr. by Scott Williams

January 2015

中文日本語

The Hanson brothers established The Subconscious Restaurant two years ago to give Taiwanese readers a glimpse of art from around the world.

A 2012 magazine exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art included a publication with an image of a white fungus on its cover. The magazine, an innovative, avant-garde periodical called White Fungus, was created by New Zealanders Ron and Mark Hanson, but happens to be based in Taiwan. The Hansons, older brother Ron and younger brother Mark, reside in Taichung and are using their magazine to raise the profile of Taiwan’s arts and artists, and further internationalize Taiwan’s art scene.

Ron came to Taiwan for the first time in 2000 at the age of 23, and still vividly recalls his first impressions. Arriving at the Lunar New Year’s holiday, he was greeted by bustling streets and friendly taxi drivers handing out cigarettes to drum up business. Ron felt the goodwill in spite of speaking no Mandarin, and fell in love with Taiwan on the spot. He encouraged his brother Mark (two years his junior) to join him here, and the two ended up staying four years.

That extended residency foreshadowed their later establishment of the magazine, the name of which originated with a can of snow fungus, simply labeled “white fungus,” that Ron came across one day in a Taichung supermarket. He was struck by the contrast between the banality of labeling a can “white fungus” in Taiwan versus its strangeness to foreign eyes, and says the red can even reminded him of Andy Warhol’s famous paintings of Campbell’s soup cans.

The Hanson brothers established The Subconscious Restaurant two years ago to give Taiwanese readers a glimpse of art from around the world.

Giving voice to local artists

Ron and Mark headed back to New Zealand in 2004 and established a studio in suburban Wellington. When the government there subsequently tore down the neighborhood’s art district and large numbers of its historic buildings to make way for road construction, residents and artists protested but went largely unheard as pressure from financial interests kept the story out of the media. Ron, who had studied journalism at university, responded by founding a magazine aimed at fostering community engagement.

He recruited his brother and a group of like-minded friends to write pseudonymous articles, sneaked into their father’s law offices at night to print the results, and then bound them by hand. They completed the inaugural issue of White Fungus in just ten days.

By featuring pieces on Wellington’s cultural history and New Zealand’s Maori people, that first issue added to locals’ knowledge of unfamiliar bits of history and provided them with a new perspective on their area. Ron’s original plan was to produce just this one issue, but within two months readers were clamoring for a second. Advertisers became interested as well. At the height of the first run’s popularity, the magazine had more than ten advertisers.

Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last. The magazine’s subject matter was too serious for general readers, limiting its distribution.

The brothers began developing other ideas after meeting Yao Jui-chung in 2006. Yao, a Taiwanese artist in New Zealand for an exhibition, told them about artists from Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. They also got to know Lee Kit, a Hong Kong artist residing in Taiwan who updated them on developments in Taiwan’s arts circles. The dynamism of Asia’s art scene, which contrasted so sharply with the relative stagnation of New Zealand’s, ended up drawing them back to Taiwan.

The amorphous form of snow fungus (Tremella fuciformis) carries over into the avant-garde White Fungus magazine, which brings readers everything from new poetry and criticism to comics and photography.

An experiment in the arts

They returned to Taichung in 2009 and relaunched White Fungus there.

Far from their homeland, the brothers devoted themselves to the production of White Fungus. They spent their days teaching English and their evenings holed up in their Nantun District apartment editing the magazine until late in the night.

They have chosen to keep White Fungus independent, supporting it entirely from their teaching income and magazine sales rather than taking ads. “We’re very poor. Life’s exhausting,” says Ron, dressed in T-shirt and jeans. Mark, who at one time worked for an advertising agency as a designer, says he’s lived the nine-to-five life but always had a little voice inside telling him he loved the magazine more. Though stretched to their limits, the two men are committed to keeping White Fungus going. “The magazine is really all we have,” explains Mark.

Starting fresh in a new city, the brothers made full use of newsletters and social media to introduce White Fungus to the world, and slowly built a following. Yao, who had been their inspiration for coming back, also lent a timely hand by taking them to galleries, recommending them to artists, and even passing out copies of the magazine on the street.

In 2012, their unconventional publication attracted MoMA’s attention and was included in its “Millennium Magazines” exhibition. With their star on the rise, the hardworking brothers were able to breathe a little more easily.

But the two men view the accolades as merely symbols. A frustrated Mark says that White Fungus itself is no different now than it was before. He argues that the recognition has only changed perceptions. People used to throw cold water on their endeavor, telling them that the magazine had no hope of success. Now, the men are fielding a seemingly endless stream of interview requests.

White Fungus began working with the British WhiteCirc agency in 2013 to distribute the magazine in the US, Japan and Europe. By bringing White Fungus to 23 nations, the agency has raised the magazine’s international profile much higher.

A fight to preserve historic buildings inspired brothers Ron (right) and Mark (left) from New Zealand to found the magazine White Fungus. Long-time residents of Taichung, the brothers have turned their zeal to promoting Taiwanese art to the international community.

Speaking to the world

For all that White Fungus speaks to the international art scene, the brothers haven’t forgotten about Taiwan. In fact, they founded a second magazine with a more local orientation in 2013. That publication, which they called The Subconscious Restaurant, covers experimental music. Unlike the more internationally oriented White Fungus, which is inaccessible to Taiwanese who don’t read English, The Subconscious Restaurant reports on Taiwanese art in a bilingual format that places Chinese and English side by side.

The new magazine’s inaugural issue documented audio–video artist Wang Fujui’s tour of New Zealand and included a piece entitled “The Taiwanese Sound Liberation Movement” that offered a retrospective on the origin and development of sound art in Taiwan. Pieces on related topics, including Betty Apple, a Taiwanese artist who excels at blending stage performance with sound creation, and Underworld, a live music venue that cultivated Taiwan’s independent music scene, followed soon after.

The two have been impressed by the creativity of Taiwanese sound art. Mark says that Taiwan has done exceptionally well in the field, and many local artists have shone brightly at the Venice Biennale. And while sound art performances aren’t an especially big draw in New York and other international cities, they have been better received in Taiwan, where audiences often number in the hundreds.

Just like White Fungus, the name of The Subconscious Restaurant grew out of Ron’s take on the differing cultural attributes of East and West. With that in mind, the magazine is more than an expression of the brothers’ passion for art: it also functions as a medium for artistic exchange between New Zealand and Taiwan. In a testament to the years the brothers have spent encouraging art exchanges, the apartment that Mark uses as his editing studio is papered with posters and magazines promoting those events.

Ron says that when not running the magazines, the two sometimes work as DJs curating musical performances. Over the last five years, they’ve invited foreign artists such as Poland’s Zbigniew Karkowski to perform in Taipei and Taichung, and promoted Taiwan on the international art scene by booking Taiwanese artists like Steve Chen for performances in New York and Berlin.

With New Zealand scheduled to be the guest of honor at the 2015 Taipei International Book Exhibition in February, Ron and Mark plan to use the expo to personally introduce their two publications to a broader audience. Seeking to spark still greater numbers of bilateral cultural exchanges, they will also curate Taiwan performances by various New Zealand sound artists.

It has now been ten years since Ron and Mark first founded White Fungus, yet they still hold on to their photocopied and hand-bound inaugural issue as a means of reminding themselves of why they created the magazine in the first place. All these years later, the two men regard Taiwan as their second home. That feeling, together with their childlike curiosity about everything, has kept them exploring and developing their experimental path through the arts here on our small island.