A plastic surgeon who is an amateur magician has brought home a gold medal from the UGM Magic Convention in Japan, the first Taiwanese to do so in the competition’s 32-year history.
Tsai Chih-tung (蔡之棟), 35, competed in Nagoya against magicians from 48 countries, including Japan and South Korea, which are considered regional powerhouses, and won on Aug. 14.
The UGM Magic Convention is considered the top competition of its kind in Asia and several professional magicians on the international scene have won UGM awards, including South Korean Lee Eung-yeol and Taiwanese Lu Chen (劉謙), who won the gold and silver medals respectively in 2001.
Photo courtesy of Alec Tsai
The convention competition alternates yearly between “stage magic” and “close-up magic,” and this year’s event focused on close-up work, which is considered the more demanding.
Tsai’s card routine, which included four techniques, was praised by the panel of five professional illusionists as “incredible.”
The doctor said that when he was a child, his grandfather liked to show him “very neat tricks,” and although he joined Taipei Medical University’s magic club, he had to give up his hobby in his final years of medical school and residency.
He took it up again after finishing his residency and decided to enter this year’s competition even though he has just seven years of active performance under this belt, Tsai said.
“In principle, being a doctor is not that different from being a magician. A doctor’s way of thinking needs to be cognitive and logical, using analysis and prediction to find the best method for dealing with a situation. Magic works in the same way by taking apart and putting together techniques to form new routines. The process demands calm analysis and willpower,” he said.
Tsai said he has no plans to turn his hobby into a professional sideline, but he does want to establish a magicians’ association with some friends to change the public’s perception of magicians from street performers to artists.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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