Betty Apple

Known for her powerful, often provocative live performance work and experimental projects, Betty Apple is one of the leading lights of  from a younger generation of avant-garde artists in Taiwan. Born in 1986 in Chiayi, Taiwan, she received her B.A. in Theater and M.A. in New Media Art at the Taipei National University of the Arts. Her focus is on live art and sound art, while also engaging in video art, performance art, electronic music producing, DJing and art curation.

During her ten years of solid physical training and directing experiences in theater and film, Apple specialized in improvised, realistic performances. In recent years, she became an advocate of live art and created the Sound of Yin (陰性聲音) series, where she improvises music through a facilitated dialogue between body and object. The main idea in this project is to symbolize what is repressed by the seemingly ‘perfect’ or ‘accurate’ sounds of science and patriarchy working in concert.

Using body politics and performativity as her framework and drawing on her lived experience as a millennial living in post-colonial Taiwan, her work appropriates symbolic objects from kitsch culture and consumer society as sound elements – particularly mass-produced objects intended for eroticism or entertainment, such as vibrators, underwear and fluorescent paint, which are carried inside the body and expressed through violent and grotesque means. Through these performances, Apple’s aim is to study and deconstruct the chaotic and hysterical “noise text” that is created from input to output, distorted by dynamics introduced by humans as well as objects.

In the past, she was the resident artist at the 2013 Lacking Sound Festival in Taiwan. Her sound/behavioral sound project “超脫國歌cha twat gringo — The Ecstasy of Anthems” won the S-An Cultural Foundation award. Her philosophy on body and sound is conveyed through performance in many art contexts, such as in Tua-Tiu-Tiann International Festival of Arts; Treasure Hill Environmental Art Lantern Festival; Sonic Anchor#23 Vinyl Collage presented by Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong; The Editorial presented by Taipei Biennale; The Grassroots festival, Taipei Fringe Festival; On Site and Taipei Art District. She was also one of the producers in “I love nuclear?!”, the first electronic music album dedicated to Taiwan’s anti-nuclear movement. In 2017, she was one of the music producers for dance company MeimageDance’s “New Paradise of Silent Island,” a production led by winner of the 19th National Award for Arts, Ho Hsiao-Mei.

In September 2017, she was invited by the Mexican art organization Vernacular Institute for an art exchange in Mexico City. When her performance was cancelled at the wake of the Central Mexico earthquake, she invited local artists to co-produce the electronic music track “Future People’s message in Earthquake” to memorialize the disaster. She also invited local artists to participate in the music fundraiser event she organized on the week the disaster struck, so as to help aid stricken areas. At the end of 2017, she worked as co-curator with Liquid Architecture during their Taiwan tour, Entering Tone. Afterwards, she also collaborated with the Japanese art organization Chim↑Pom and organized the block party “道上趴體Art is in the pARTy” on top of Chim↑Pom’s 2017 Asian Biennale piece “道street.”

https://soundcloud.com/applebetty

Documentation