Organizers of the annual Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival have finalized the bands for this year's five-day event and are hoping that the five overseas acts and over 100 local bands set to perform in the week-long festival will make this year's concert the biggest in the event's six-year history.
Set to take place from July 20 to 24, from 3pm, to 10pm daily, at Fulung Beach in Taipei County, Ho-Hai-Yan will once again showcase well-known acts on its main stage, while packing the second stage with performances by many of Taiwan's lesser-known alt/indie rock acts.
While the festival still pales in comparison in size to the major European summer festivals, the event has managed to become the nation's most popular outdoor festival. Last year an estimated 100,000 people flocked to the sleepy seaside town of Fulong to have fun in the sun and helped to make Ho-Hai-Yan 2004 the largest rock festival ever have been staged in Taiwan.
No doubt a couple of the main reasons behind the event's huge popularity are the facts that it is free and held on a beach, but organizers also believe that the inclusion of international acts in recent years has been a main factor in drawing in such large crowds.
This year's international line-up includes five acts of very differing genres. The international line-up will feature performances by female rocker Melissa, rap/groove-box beat artist Peaches, Japanese electronic-pop duo Boom Boom Satellites, semi-ambient/post rock instrumentalist Vincent Gallo and alt-rock trio Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
As in past years the Ho-Hai-Yan Indie Rock Awards will take place this year with a panel of judges from the domestic music industry issuing one award. A second award will be based on audience votes, and a third award that will be decided by a panel of judges selected from local major media groups, which includes the Taipei Times.
Along with the music the Ho-Hai-Yan Festival will for the first time include a mini film festival and movies will be screened after the music ends at roughly 10pm on each night of the event.
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
President William Lai (賴清德) has championed Taiwan as an “AI Island” — an artificial intelligence (AI) hub powering the global tech economy. But without major shifts in talent, funding and strategic direction, this vision risks becoming a static fortress: indispensable, yet immobile and vulnerable. It’s time to reframe Taiwan’s ambition. Time to move from a resource-rich AI island to an AI Armada. Why change metaphors? Because choosing the right metaphor shapes both understanding and strategy. The “AI Island” frames our national ambition as a static fortress that, while valuable, is still vulnerable and reactive. Shifting our metaphor to an “AI Armada”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS