MON Ya-Feng
MON Ya-Feng is an independent author and researcher who holds a doctorate from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been active in Taiwan’s arts sector and cultural landscape since the 1990s. Her interdisciplinary practice spans academic research, moving-image curation, avant-garde theater, and cultural publishing. She has held positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Eslite Reader; Funscreen Weekly; the International Center for Cultural Studies at National Chiao Tung University; the Department of Mass Communication at Providence University; and the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. She also created and presented nine experimental stage works with Critical Point Theatre Phenomenon and served as resident curator at Taoyuan Arts Cinema from 2018 to 2021.
Mon is the author of Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan: Cinema as a Sensory Circuit (Amsterdam University Press, 2016; reissued by Routledge in 2025). A 2019 review in the International Journal of Asian Studies described the book as a landmark in contemporary film studies. Her latest book, Boundaries of Sensibilities: Imagerial Exercises in Technologies, was published in by Zebra Crossing Publishing in 2026 as part of its Intermission series. She also edited Fragrant Formosa (2021), and her writings have appeared in leading international publications, including The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening and Besides the Screen. Her recent research projects supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation—Lyrical Medium: Consciousness Formation & Media Materialism and Healing Tomorrow: An Archivology of the Body—focus on the intersections of media materiality, archives of body and mind, and the formation of consciousness.
About the performance: Hearing Sounds on the Borderline
The coordination of senses functions as a collective experience of minute-to-minute transitions between variegated bodily perceptions. In today’s tech-immersed environment, info transmission, on the other hand, works primitively within an organism-to-organism nexus of sensory flows. This performance aims to find an alternative path to hearing/listening that is mundane but considered ‘out of the norm’. Employing ethnography, it looks beyond affect theories and quantum explanations, but navigates through liminal phenomena, such as telepathy and auditory hallucinations, to re-grasp sounds as remotely shared carnal mechanisms that incorporate elements uncanny to positivist approach yet do not give way to acceptance of the unknown or the mystic. Walking along the line of Raymond Williams’ conception of ‘structure of feelings’, this work searches for a method to make plausible why and how individualistically exceptional sensations may in fact be social/structural, and on a global scale too, not least in the age of ancient wisdom revival.