TAIPEI TECHNO
The tea in Taiwan is fruity and laced with ketamine
I wanted to go to Taipei to find out if queer Asian rave utopia exists. Over the past decade or so, friends who’ve made party pilgrimages to Organik festival or Pawnshop have returned with stories so strange they had the improbable aura of myths: tales of tripping on a beach of black volcanic sand, breakneck-techno parties for queer Asian women, a gay club where the sweaty bodies of shirtless men smelled of heavenly Aesop soap… could such a world truly exist?
As a rave reporter, I am always tracking the global nightlife hubs where new ideas are brewing, but my enthrallment with Taipei’s lore felt more personal. Maybe this psychedelic island glimmering in the midst of hostile seas could be where I’d witness the impossible: a rave culture accepted by a society of people who looked like my parents, and spoke my grandmothers’ tongue.
Growing up in Singapore, I was accustomed to underground music scenes operating in stealth mode, due to the autocratic government’s intolerance for anything that subverted the norm, especially altered states of consciousness. A few months ago, for example, a drag show at a Singaporean art gallery caused a moralistic uproar from the conservative establishment, after inflammatory media coverage resulted in a conservative backlash.
In stark contrast, Taipei’s queer parties operate openly and legally in clubs and government-sanctioned festivals, without the need for nepotism, bribery, or corruption (the real way to “get away with shit” in many parts of Asia). This is due to Taiwan’s unique status as a beacon of democracy and progressive values in Asia, where Confucian patriarchy coexists with a thriving underground party scene. Given my hard-wired association of partying in Asia with risk and stigma, the normalcy of raving in Taipei was confusing–-it was like the math didn’t add up.
Taiwan’s freedom, however, comes with a price: the anxiety of China’s imminent invasion, a fate that many believe is inevitable after decades of cross-Strait tensions. This political precarity ratcheted up even more last January, when the country went to the polls for a close Presidential race watched closely by the rest of the world. Which candidate won the race would determine the country’s future direction: continued sovereignty, or realignment with mainland China.
Friends told me to visit now, before it’s too late – just look at what happened to Hong Kong, these global party nomads said, pointing to the city that many creative types have been fleeing in recent years due to the Chinese government’s heavy-handed crackdown on pro-democracy in 2019. These protests, which were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons, effectively silenced dissent and left behind a decimated nightlife scene. Many bars and nightclubs in Hong Kong shut down, hurt by the economic impact, loss of tourism, and overall sense of fear and uncertainty. A similar outcome could easily befall Taiwan. Its window of radical possibility is open now, but no one knows for how long.
I first encountered an enigmatic club called Grey Area through the envious gaze of my Instagram feed. Friends in Singapore’s Strange Weather crew were visiting Taipei to throw a party at the venue, and their striking photos caught my eye. What caught my eye was a flood of white morning light streaming in through a window, radiating off the bodies of smiling homies raising beers around a DJ who seemed to be playing off some kind of… desk? The whole scene seemed so intimate and mysterious, radiating a soft afterparty glow I associate with the most cathartic purges – that almost holy transfiguration when debauchery gives into grace.
I’d never heard of Gray Area so I Googled it, only to be confused by the listing for a 4.7-star Japanese restaurant that popped up with the same address. “Variety of items and delicious dishes,” read the only review, with a grainy photo of cute Taiwanese girls sitting over coffee cups. The reviews from the rave heads were equally inscrutable. “Gray Area is my fav club on the planet!!!” replied LA’s impish rabble-rouser Adam O over email, when I wrote in to his newsletter asking for Taipei recommendations after reading his account of a two-night bender. (The text accompanied a beguiling mix of Chinese trip-hop, California alt-rock, and tribal house from the Taiwanese DJ Tsui on Adam’s dublab radio show.) “Shawn is actually the owner,” Adam added, as if I was supposed to know who he was talking about??
I followed the address to a charming old street in the trendy Zhongshan District that smelled like the pungent flesh of stinky tofu. A door person shyly told us the only house rule: smoking was only permitted on the ground-level bar, not any of the other floors–a rule that the DJs and staff flagrantly disregarded, but was strictly enforced for everyone else, which I loved. The micro-club, which could fit maybe 150 people, had a bizarro logic all of its own.
While the ground floor looked like a minimalist post-industrial cafe with a sleek bar made of exposed concrete, things got progressively kookier as I traipsed up the treacherously vertiginous stairs. On the second-floor dancefloor, a proper lighting rig and soundsystem gave it the feel of a strobe-lit womb, and peering into the dark, I saw a paper-mache rickshaw parked inexplicably in the corner and a giant teapot hanging from the roof. In the bathroom, hundreds of cockroaches crawled up the walls (an optical illusion not suitable for the faint of heart).
Grey Area, which opened in 2021, describes itself as a “community center” and is the kind of friendly neighborhood spot where a bummed cigarette could lead to a meandering conversation with strangers. The vibe was inclusive but not corny, cool without trying too hard, and many of the punters we met were off-duty DJs and rave organizers from places like Korea, Manchester, Australia, and Berlin. We all came to the laughing conclusion that this eccentric club felt like a ketamine trip, the divisions of floors fracturing the experience into disjunctive realities. Eventually, we all found ourselves on the k-hole-friendly top-floor lounge, piled on mountains of beanbags to an early-morning ambient set by DJ Fart in the Club and Big Leg, who sat cross-legged in front of CDJs placed casually on the floor.
I realized gleefully that the original scene I’d witnessed on Instagram was replaying in a new refraction, and the soft white light sifting through the frosted-glass window into this afterparty was even more sublime in-person. The reverberations of heavy bass gave the feeling of sinking low in a submarine, disembodied voices echoing through the sea. Behind me, two pairs of mannequin limbs appeared to be floating low off the ground like a levitating corpse. I thought: if every party contains the ineffable qualities of its creator, this place could only emerge from the mind of a maniac, maybe.
That maniac-maestro turned out to be Shawn, who I found sitting by the bar and gave me the impression of someone who was perpetually in on a joke. (“I’m just a kid!!!” he said gleefully at one point, a mischievous smile wrapped around his face.) Pulling up his sleeve, he showed me a tattoo of a tongue licking an acid tab on his bicep, then pulled me outside to show off a sign in Japanese that still hung by the venue’s entrance. His family used to run this space, he explained, and he’d intentionally kept the Google listing up to throw off unwanted tourists even though it is no longer a restaurant.
Shawn also explained that the collaged portrait of a Chinese man’s face gazes from the club’s stairwells and urinals like Big Brother is a collaged portrait of three political leaders who’d run for President in the recent elections. The incumbent Democratic People’s Party, the conservative Kuomintang, and the center-left Taiwan People’s Party had each offered different visions for Taiwan’s future, and ultimately, the progressive DPP had narrowly won the race, effectively telling China to back off and “face reality.” “Which party did you vote for?” I asked Shawn, but he waved me off. “It doesn’t matter! And I don’t give a fuck which party my friends voted for either,” he laughed. Then, he turned serious, and gestured around the room.
“In Taiwan, we don’t have independence,” he said. “But we have culture.”
What Shawn said stuck with me, because it suggested a role for rave culture that I’d never thought of before: as a form of national self-determination in the absence of formal political agency. In other words, Taipei’s progressive party scene represents a way for a certain subset of Taiwanese people to feel a sense of belonging to their country that is separate and protected from the threat of foreign rule.
Taiwanese nightlife nationalism contrasted with Singapore’s, in that Singaporean rave organizers are often more interested in defying the government’s narrative of the county as an isolated and exceptional nation. Both of these two young states’ party scenes are engaged with questions of cultural identity formation, but in opposite directions: Singaporean ravers (re)connect their country to the broader Southeast Asian diaspora, while the Taiwanese assert their distinctiveness from the Chinese mainland.
The next night, through some luck and a small dose of misfortune, I would find myself at two more spots that complete the holy trinity of the Taiwanese underground (to be continued…)