by Audrey Shon
“Best Before” music festival is planned to be launched on campus in late May, arranged by a coordinating team with students from Fu-Jen trying to make it “more than just a festival.” Publicity director Aki Lim said the organizing team chose this name to remind people to seize and cherish the time now. According to Lim, while there have been other music festivals in the country with different themes, such as Gongsheng Music Festival (to commemorate victims for the 228 incident) or Hái-éng Festival (to remind people the importance of speaking mother tongue), “Best Before” is the very first festival targeting university students.
“The core value we are trying to convey here is to emphasize the importance of staying accompanied. There are indeed times when we feel lonely and melancholy, but the most important thing is the support from family and friends,” Lim said. This festival features famous Taiwanese bands, including Yeemao (夜貓組), Hormone Boys (賀爾蒙少年), Constanan Change (康士坦的變化球), and Wayne’s so Sad (傷心欲絕). These bands have composed many songs which reflect the current problems and worries that young people face.
The team cooperated with the student counseling center and the center agreed to provide professional advice and services for the spectators of the festival. This festival focuses on promoting the importance of maintaining mental health with support from the community and thus will launch a series of related events. These special activities linked to the theme include speeches given by psychologists and experts from specific fields and workshops with associations about preventing suicide or school bullying. One of the workshops featured Professor Chang Shu-mei from National Chia-Yi University. She is a specialist in education and teenager psychology. In the workshop, she led participants to share their experiences of having conflicts with other people to try to view these experiences in another way to lessen their negative feelings. The team also plans a few movie exhibitions. The films being played are A Beautiful Mind and Marathon, both bio-pics about people suffering from mental illness who still accomplished great things in their lives. Lim says that in her perspective, being mentally healthy is not just being healthy without mental illness, but reaching a sense of peace and comfort.
Apart from the workshops and film showings, the team designed interactive exhibitions at different spots on campus. The exhibitions included The Museum of Sad Memories, which allowed students to exhibit one or two objects related to an experience of a sad journey and mementoes related to their memories of sorrow. Letters from exes, gifts from a family member who passed away were all part of the exhibition. Another interactive exhibition was Temet Nosce in Latin, or Know Thyself in English. For the event, they translated this motto as “Find Yourself,” and it consisted of two areas. The first part of the exhibition featured a bulletin board which enabled viewers to write down their emotions and confessions on post-its and then paste them onto the walls. The second part was an immersive space that provided headphones, pictures, and projections of the sky and universe so that viewers can relax and take a break from the noisy world.
The team cooperated with the student counseling center and the center agreed to provide professional advice and services for the spectators of the festival. This festival focuses on promoting the importance of maintaining mental health with support from the community and thus will launch a series of related events. These special activities linked to the theme include speeches given by psychologists and experts from specific fields and workshops with associations about preventing suicide or school bullying. One of the workshops featured Professor Chang Shu-mei from National Chia-Yi University. She is a specialist in education and teenager psychology. In the workshop, she led participants to share their experiences of having conflicts with other people to try to view these experiences in another way to lessen their negative feelings. The team also plans a few movie exhibitions. The films being played are A Beautiful Mind and Marathon, both bio-pics about people suffering from mental illness who still accomplished great things in their lives. Lim says that in her perspective, being mentally healthy is not just being healthy without mental illness, but reaching a sense of peace and comfort.
Apart from the workshops and film showings, the team designed interactive exhibitions at different spots on campus. The exhibitions included The Museum of Sad Memories, which allowed students to exhibit one or two objects related to an experience of a sad journey and mementoes related to their memories of sorrow. Letters from exes, gifts from a family member who passed away were all part of the exhibition. Another interactive exhibition was Temet Nosce in Latin, or Know Thyself in English. For the event, they translated this motto as “Find Yourself,” and it consisted of two areas. The first part of the exhibition featured a bulletin board which enabled viewers to write down their emotions and confessions on post-its and then paste them onto the walls. The second part was an immersive space that provided headphones, pictures, and projections of the sky and universe so that viewers can relax and take a break from the noisy world.