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 specialised 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 symbolise 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.

Betty Apple has recently created work for Biennale Jogja in Indonesia, HKW House of the Cultures of the World in Berlin, Bergen Assembly in Norway, Plyfreely Music Festival in Singapore, Mutek Japan in Tokyo and many more.