ilha formosa

The Edinburgh Fringe Show 2023 – Kuan-wen Huang (Ilha Formosa)

Kuan-wen Huang’s Fringe show for 2023 is ‘Ilha Formosa’, (which means ‘beautiful island’ in Portuguese, a nod towards the sailors who landed on the islands in the 16th century). In it, he talks about how he traded his beloved Taiwan for the rainy British Isles, what it means to be Taiwanese and what it symbolises through generations of migration and shifting identities.

The show does have some autobiographical elements, how could it not given its subject, but it does offer that time-honoured use of comedy to take a sideways look at both politics and the human condition through a medium that makes it easy to talk about complicated issues.

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