MON Ya-Feng
Mon Ya-Feng is an independent author and researcher, who holds a doctorate from Goldsmiths,
University of London. Besides working at academic institutes, she plays an active role in the contemporary art scene in Taipei. These include directing stage plays, curating films, and co-producing with sound artists. Her research looks at the affordances of technologies in communications, focusing on the intimacy of the body with everyday machines. The current project is specifically on “hearing” as a borderline experience between the physical/somatic and the mystical/transcendent. Her first book Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan: Cinema as a Sensory Circuit was published in 2016 by Amsterdam University Press and republished by Routledge in 2025. Boundaries of Sensibilities: Imagerial Exercises in Technologies, her interdisciplinary study on techno-capitalist virtuality, was published in Chinese in 2026.
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. On the basis of these observations, 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 a positivist approach yet do not give way to acceptance of the mystical. Walking along the line of Raymond Williams’ conception of “structure of feelings”, this work searches for a method to make plausible why and how singularly exceptional sensations may in fact be social/structural, and on a global scale too, not least in the age of ancient wisdom revival.