Eva Chen & Hank Chung / Editor in Chief & Publisher of qdy magazine
Seeing Japan through the Taiwanese Lens
“We brought with us some bread, milk and picnic blanket to take photos, struggling to set everything wonderfully, and turned out the milk was spilt and the bread was chaotic. Eventually we managed to take a nice shot of our picnic, but we knew there’s something wrong with the photos. ” Eva, the Editor in Chief of qdy magazine, giggled while recounting vividly the anecdote when she first started to run a magazine with her friends. It’s not okay to pursue something that doesn’t belong to our real lives, just for the sake of producing ideal content, she concluded.
Hearing Eva talks is a process you’d like to go on forever. Sometimes she uses exaggerated yet the most suitable expressions to narrate their experience which makes a good laugh, at other times she seems like dragging us to a cave full of incredible thoughts, echoing with our inner voices. The qdy magazine she edited shares the same quality— light-hearted and stunningly profound. If you think that seeing Japanese culture through a Taiwanese lens has already reached the limits of qdy team’s creativity, you’d be amazed ceaselessly by their themes such as connecting Ginza line and curry by their common yellowish orange colour, pairing Umeshu with braised pork rice, and an advertising campaign of cooking with beer. The seeds for creation are watered with sweat, the work of exploring and consolidating wasn’t built in a day. The future of both Hong Kong and Taiwanese publication industries might look bleak, yet the fact that qdy magazine won two of the most acclaimed publication awards in Taiwan reminds us that the spring is nearer than we thought.
In the speech of receiving the Editor’s Award of the Golden Tripod Awards, Eva remarked she would nourish every soul with their printed publication endlessly, just as the ways those magazines reshaped her worldview when she was little— and indeed, qdy magazine makes its mark on constructing an unparalleled angle to record the life and culture of Taiwan, uplifting the gloomy individuals with the story of their own thriving.
qdy magazine has a unique point of view that chooses a Taiwanese angle to gaze at Japanese culture. Can you tell us how this idea came upon you?
Right after our graduation in 2011, we decided to work on magazine publication, because we loved magazines. At that time we wanted to create lifestyle content, and we took a shot at making a Taiwan Kinfolk. We packed bread, milk and a picnic blanket to the photoshoot, but turned out it was all a mess trying to look beautiful — milk spilled and bread was in the wrong place. Although appealing pictures were produced eventually, they seemed somehow unmatched. Then we mused, perhaps it wasn’t good for us to pursue something we didn’t belong, just to look glamourous. There were a whole lot of topics we’ve tried, but it was not until the making of the lanjing (the blue whale) did we contemplate what we truly were. And yet, in the meantime, magazines which zoomed in local content emerged with their specific energies. We all agreed that local people told better local stories than we did, to bring out the places’ charms or issues. So, we said farewell to the lanjing. During the lanjing’s production we discovered that the entanglement between Taiwan and Japan was a mixture of love and hate, and to conclude, Taiwan people’s interest in Japan was keen and their acceptance of Japanese content was wide. After balancing the commercial side and dreams we adjusted our publication, and on November in 2014 we were determined to look at Japan from a Taiwan’s perspective through qdy magazine. We go for a more playful tone to delve into Taiwan’s and Japan’s interesting views and directions from a modern lens.
How do you find a balance between creating the content you love and having enough financial support?
Besides branding and sales volume, a magazine needs a philosophy and values which can bring out its essence. We manage print publishing, social network sites and webpages at the same time, our largest source of income comes from commercials and sales. We’ve always wanted to reshape Taiwan’s commercial environment, by trying to tell the brands that there are still plenty of people taking pains to make changes. For example, we created an illustrated commercials to go with our theme about illustrations, and they are quite a match. And there’s an edition on cookery, so we teach readers how to cook with beers! Taiwan’s readers are getting sharper than ever, so they’d think like “Oh you are yielding to money” or “You are not independent anymore” when they see the branded content. We surely don’t want to give way to this advertising form, but at the same time we need commercials to sustain ourselves, that’s why we are striving for creating commercials more enjoyable to read. This also requires the training and thinking throughout our publishing career to grasp readers’ mindset. It’s never going to be a painless task, very few Taiwan’s brands are willing to make a shot. Our power might be just a drop in the ocean, but we’ll prove it works anyway.
Before the debut of qdy magazine, you have impressed me by saying you were going to “create the magazine which amazes even the Japanese people” in the fundraising campaign. Have you succeeded in reaching this goal?
I believe this question could be explained with the example of the Taiwanese elements. Just now I‘ve mentioned Umeshu and Taiwanese cuisine, and what we want to tell the readers of Taiwan and Japan is that the spirit of Umeshu lies in the fact that it is a homemade wine, and therefore, instead of pairing it with gourmet food, we usually have it with family dishes. That’s why in one of our issues we introduced some Taiwanese foods, for instance, fried chicken, oyster omelet, milkfish congee and braised pork rice etc., to pair with Umeshu. We aim at developing original content by fusing Taiwanese and Japanese cultures. And these ideas can only be found in qdy magazine. Intriguing topics allow people from these two places to better understand each other, and we’ll carry this on through a Taiwan lens. Indeed, we will make a magazine that amazes the Japanese people. Of course Japanese people can also produce content about their own culture, but it is not likely that they could create some fusion materials like we do.
What are your future plans? Will you continue to work towards this goal?
There’s a popular saying in Taiwan, “the more local you are, the more international you’ll be”, that means getting to understand better our local culture can help us develop a global mind. This trend encourages us to dig into Taiwan, and we can now provide information about our homeland, not only the facts already known by most. When we see more of our own Taiwan, we incorporate Taiwan’s elements into Japanese cultural content, or even Hong Kong cultural subjects. This is what we’ll strive for in the future.
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Video Interview by Sabrina Li
Text by Sabrina Li
qdy magazine
No. 9-8, Pucheng Street, Da' an District, Taipei City, Taiwan 106
