Anderson Hung

Taipei, fashion writing and Central Saint Martins

Hung grew up in Taipei and began fashion writing at fifteen. A first-year CSM student when named a Vogue Business competition runner-up in April 2023, he described family skepticism about fashion as a career and his interest in its cultural and political dimensions. The prize offered six months with an unnamed editorial mentor.³

His training was not exclusively textual. His public professional profile dates his CSM studies to 2022–25 and records production and costume-design work on Run Over in July–August 2022. In a related account of working with Scene 8 Studio, he describes making character costumes and overseeing production design for Run Over and Containment, naming director Vincent Soberano and a producer, Sarah. These are Hung’s own work-history statements. The same profile lists volunteer digital-media work for Rotary International from 2019, including translation, subtitles, documents and presentations.⁴

His early writing already treated fashion as a social language. In the February 2023 article Ivy beyond old-money, he brought cultural historian W. David Marx into a discussion of clothing that travels between elite institutions and subcultures. Rather than treating a style as the property of a single class or country, the piece follows its reuse and rejection. This was a student reporter testing an approach: locate an aesthetic in a longer cultural history, then ask how its meaning changes when different people wear it.⁵

Finding sources, translating interviews, entering print

Punks Without Borders, dated December 2022 in his archive, offers an unusually explicit account of access. Hung sought a comparison between the visual worlds of British and Chinese punk. Jamie Reid declined an interview, so the British side came through Reid’s gallery representative, John Marchant; the Chinese artist was Bo Lu, located through online searching and referrals. Hung disclosed translating Lu’s interview from Mandarin into English and making the cover illustration and design. The result was an edited pairing of conversations, not a meeting between the two artists. He later added a note after Reid’s death in August 2023.⁶

Translation, source-finding and design belonged to the same assignment.⁷

A different kind of access appears in his March 2023 profile of hairstylist Ali Pirzadeh. Hung met and photographed him in a Dalston café; the resulting piece also appeared in the first issue of Glue Magazine, available at the CSM art shop. Work interruptions, images shown on a phone and discussion of a book-in-progress enter the portrait alongside the stylist’s account of Iranian identity and artistic freedom. The publication venue locates Hung within an immediate student-facing print world, while the text makes the stylist intelligible through conversations, materials and projects as well as clients.⁸

For his November 2023 Vogue Business article on Goopimade, Hung interviewed a co-founder, a retailer and a fashion academic. Development cycles, textile suppliers and the relationship between brand and retail operations helped explain the Taiwanese label’s international expansion. Here his task was to explain the business behind a recognizable style.⁹

Following a collection and organizing a backstage assignment

For the 2024 feature Pigeons, Hung followed CSM designer Samuel Friberg for three months, supplying photographs as well as text. The collection began with the material habits of warehouse living: salvaging what others discarded. Hung found bicycle parts and cables in Friberg’s room, then followed their conversion into clothes. Flattened tyres became a jacket; chains entered crochet. The article lets the designer explain his intended combination of aggression and elegance, then arrives at a revealing complication: during the course lineup, tutor Sarah Gresty wanted the result made rougher. That request complicates the designer’s stated balance of aggression and elegance.¹⁰

Returning over time allowed Hung to record that discrepancy. Friberg’s account of himself did not have to bear the whole portrait; making, teaching and selection supplied other tests. Hung followed the clothes into the graduate press show, tracing how a collection changes while becoming publicly presentable.¹¹

His Elephant Gym feature, published in June 2024, compressed the encounter into a different window: backstage at Bristol’s Strange Brew, two hours before the Taiwanese band’s show, with another group soundchecking beyond the door. Hung drew out a compositional procedure. Each song had a designated producer; the musicians could offer as many as five alternatives for their respective parts. Their sound emerged through successive proposals. International collaborations also required file exchanges, payments and trust on a short schedule.¹²

The performance supplied a different kind of material. An audience member interrupted the band’s introduction of Taiwan with a claim that it belonged to China. Hung recorded guitarist Tell Chang’s onstage response, then incorporated bassist KT Chang’s later Facebook account of fearing an attack. The sequence distinguishes an interview, a witnessed event and a subsequent statement, while showing how a performance abroad can become a political encounter.¹³

Photographer Shan-Huai Chiang’s own project account independently confirms that Hung invited him to photograph the interview and identifies the work as an independent commission in June 2024. The shared assignment brought another photographer’s choices into the finished piece and gave Chiang material that he later developed within his own practice.¹⁴

The two assignments required different kinds of follow-through. With Friberg, Hung could return to see what changed; with Elephant Gym, he had to make use of a brief meeting and then decide how events afterward altered its meaning. Photography and another contributor also became part of the reporting, not an illustration commissioned after the account was finished.

Reporting on Taiwan’s music institutions

Hung’s 2024 Taiwan reporting also looked backward. His Q&A with documentary filmmaker Pulp Chen reconstructs entry into the underground scene: how the filmmakers encountered LTK Commune, what making the film involved, and which places and cultural channels mattered. A question about elite-educated musicians’ adoption of the class-marked term Taike follows from the preceding answer. Hung then asks whether the contemporary scene retains an earlier political rebelliousness. A closing note dates the conversation to 8 May 2024, before subsequent political protests complicated its discussion of stability.¹⁵

In That Fucking Place!, his subject was Arthur Chen and the infrastructure around Taipei’s music venues. Hung organized the account around places, programming decisions, original-song policies and changing audiences. This shifts attention from the celebrated performer to the person deciding what can be played and under what conditions. Chen’s recollections provide much of the history; Hung uses them to connect a working life to programming and organizational decisions.¹⁶

Broadening the beat: labor, migration and cultural access

Hung’s late-2024 portfolio extended his attention to the difficulties of entering creative work. His feature on Brown creatives in Singapore assembled several voices rather than asking a single successful individual to stand for inclusion. It attended to commissions, professional connections, stereotyping and the need to combine independent work with corporate employment. Some names were changed at the interviewees’ request because of concerns about consequences within the industry.¹⁷

In Taiwan, his article on contemporary folk religion brought a metal band, a deity-costume designer and a bamboo artist into the same frame. Hung’s own photograph of Yu-Shen Li in his studio accompanied an explanation of how costume construction had to accommodate religious restrictions. The piece is characteristic of his interest in the meeting of cultural identity and material decisions. Rather than treating tradition as a static image, he follows the people negotiating what can change and what must be respected.¹⁸

His London reporting made similar questions local. In the January 2025 Meihui Liu profile, a café interview becomes an account of how a designer moved among clothing, shops, gatherings, curating and other work. Hung asks what rent, access to space and the costs of seasonal collections do to a creative community. Liu’s longevity offers historical depth to a subject he was also encountering as a younger participant in London.¹⁹

A May 2025 investigation began with Hung’s own experience of changing hairdressers during four years in London. He mapped roughly forty Japanese salons, then asked practitioners how they had acquired their skills and arrived in the city. Mai, a Soho salon manager, described beauty college, demanding salon training in Tokyo and further study at Vidal Sassoon in London to work with different hair types. The apparent export of a national style became a more complicated movement of learned techniques.²⁰

The interviews also resist a single migration story. One stylist planned to return to Tokyo; another valued London’s changing tastes but questioned its uniqueness. Hung followed those choices into clientele and immigration uncertainty. This is where the article’s evidence is strongest: people describing training, customers and possible departures. Its broader claims about Japanese diligence and social anxiety are less securely established by the interviews. The distinction matters to his developing practice: explaining a cultural reputation requires attention to the differences among the people gathered under it.²¹

Studio Particles: publishing and a practical directory

Particles gave Hung responsibility for a platform rather than only individual articles. On its bilingual About page, he signs as Anderson Shao-Wei Hung, Âng Siāu-ui and 洪紹崴. The project describes itself as an independent, not-for-profit community for Taiwanese creatives in Britain, responding to diasporic disconnection and structural barriers. Its manifesto declines to prescribe a single Taiwanese aesthetic.²²

The credits make the division of labor visible. Hung takes creative direction, writing and design; Shan-Huai Chiang is credited as assistant, Yujinia Yung Hsuan Wang as illustrator and Paxton Wang as web developer. Advisers include James Anderson, Tamsin Blanchard, Philip Clarke, Isabella Coraça and Margarita Louca. The FAQ describes a small part-time team and says the project does not intend to make a profit.²³

The actual directory is more concrete than a general promise of community. Five entries bear the date 9 May 2025: Jiesi Yao, Yujinia Wang, Adam Lin, De-Wei Yu and Hsin Hwang. They bring image-making, painting, illustration, fashion, sculpture and printmaking together. The records include bilingual biographies, galleries, film links and fields identifying the kinds of collaborators or opportunities each person seeks. A visitor is therefore given more than a finished portfolio to admire: the page supplies a possible next working connection.²⁴

The directory makes a practical editorial choice: it places a person’s search for collaborators beside the account of what they make. Selection, bilingual writing and information design work together. Hung’s role expands from bringing a subject to a reader to organizing a small, navigable professional community.²⁵

Reporting beyond graduation: stages, sets and the price of images

Hung’s later Mission articles show continuity with the production questions in his student-era work. In November 2025, his feature on the architecture of Benson Boone’s tour interviewed Stufish’s Ray Winkler and followed a stage from drawings toward repeated assembly, transport, performance and safety. Sightlines and proximity to the audience were considered alongside the space that could otherwise hold ticket buyers. Hung included the wider production team, explaining how its members made the performance physically repeatable.²⁶

His February 2026 interview with set designer Piers Hanmer brought the economics further forward. A book of images opened a discussion of improvisation, last-minute rebuilding, shrinking editorial budgets and the exchange between editorial visibility and advertising work. Hung did not leave the reader with the finished photograph alone. He included the unpleasant intensity of making it and the arrangements through which creative freedom had been subsidized.²⁷

Paid work and collective publishing after college

In Jesse Agblevor’s October 2026 interview, Hung described the paid work outside journalism as part of an interdisciplinary practice. University’s international environment had not prepared him for all of London’s barriers; people raised there possessed networks he lacked.²⁸

He was also running a zine collective, balancing production costs against access and what readers could afford. The article does not name it, so it cannot securely be equated with Particles. Hung’s formulation of what sustained him was direct: “Shared value and meaningful collaboration keep me going and remind me of the importance of my work.”²⁹

Those commitments leave him negotiating fees, production costs and the possibility of remaining in London, while continuing to publish. Neither the collective’s scale nor his own working arrangement is presented as settled.

Selected chronology

Where to begin reading

• For his reporting process: Pigeons and the Elephant Gym feature offer contrasting durations and assignment structures.^{43, 44}
• For his bilingual editorial work: Punks Without Borders is unusually explicit about access and translation.⁴⁵
• For a service trade’s wider environment: the Japanese-hairdresser investigation.⁴⁶
• For the platform he built: read Particles’ manifesto alongside its directory, keeping aspiration separate from demonstrated operation.^{47, 48}
• For an adjacent kind of portrait: his April 2025 profile of Hua Yang’s Jiaonest supper club follows migration, food techniques and communal dining into a small cultural enterprise.⁴⁹