Brian Hioe (丘琦欣) is a writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ based out of Taipei.
In 2014, he was one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine (破土), an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific that was founded after the Sunflower Movement, which he was a participant in as a student activist. In his capacity as such, he helps run the community space for events that New Bloom runs in Taipei, DAYBREAK (破曉咖啡). From 2017 to 2018, he was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, during which he assembled the Daybreak Project, a 400,000-word oral history archive and encyclopedia of the Sunflower Movement. Since 2019, after the wave of protests in Hong Kong later known as the Anti-ELAB Movement, he has been involved in Lausan (流傘), a collective of writers, researchers, activists, and artists engaging with Hong Kong’s political struggles. In 2020, he became one of the founding editors of the Brick House, a journalist-owned media collective, and arts and culture-focused platform No Man is an Island. He is currently a non-resident fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Research Hub. Since 2024, through the Brick House, he writes for collectively-run outlet Flaming Hydra.
Hioe’s writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, The Diplomat, Art Forum, Disegno, Made in China Journal, The Mekong Review, Popula, China File, The China Policy Institute Blog, Taiwan Insight, and other publications. His writing focuses on contemporary politics, society, and the arts in Taiwan.
Television and radio appearances by Hioe have included on Al-Jazeera, the BBC World Service, Channel NewsAsia, Democracy Now, Intelligence Squared, Metro News, Netflix, NZZ, Radio Radicale, RFI, RSI, RaiNews, The Spectator, and other programs. He regularly appears as a guest on the radio program, Taiwan This Week, on ICRT in Taiwan.
Hioe has been quoted in news reports from The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, BBC, Nikkei Asia, and other publications. Outside of Taiwan, he has been invited to speak on events in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Australia, on occasions ranging from academic conferences to art festivals.
Translations by Hioe range from academic and literary texts to film and television scripts, including the script for the video game Urban Legend Scout, exhibitions for the National Taiwan Museum and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, essays in Flaneur Magazine, and the personal narratives of White Terror victims published by the Chen Wen-chen Memorial Foundation.
He has a Master’s in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature in 2013. In his spare time, he occasionally DJs, playing techno, house, and eclectic music. Check out his MixCloud!
Photo credits: Daphne K. Lee, SOAS