From Bandung's Hangout Corners to Taipei's Livehouses: How Irfan Turned a Joke Called the ID-TW Pop Bureau into Real Pop Diplomacy
Taiwan and Indonesia share no formal diplomatic ties — but a Bandung-born writer has spent five years proving that a scene network can do what an embassy can't.
When Irfan first visited Taiwan in 2019, he did what he always does in a new country: he went looking for a record store. He ended up at Waiting Room in Taipei, where he left five cassettes of his old shoegaze trio, Melt, and asked the owner, Trix, what was worth hearing. He walked out with two CDs — Boyz & Girl and Iruka Porisu — and, without quite realising it, a new obsession.
As a journalist and zine-maker since his student days in Bandung, author of the book Bandung Pop Darlings, he insists on the title “writer and researcher,” not promoter or curator. “The process of writing, the process of research, is always my framework,” he says. When a pandemic-hit newspaper career and a Taiwanese scholarship pushed him to move to Taipei in November 2021.
The ID-TW Pop Bureau was, by his own admission, a joke. “The term sounds official on purpose,” he grins. With no diplomatic relationship between the two countries, “culture often speaks louder than politics,” so he mocked the vacuum with a bureaucratic name — until curator Weining listed it as his affiliation in LUCfest’s guestbook and it quietly became real.
Ask Irfan what he does and he’ll correct the premise. Not a promoter, not a curator, not a booking agent — “writer and researcher,” full stop. “The process of writing, the process of research, is always my framework.”
“Cultural diplomacy is abstract — there’s no instant formula. But I believe the results will come.”
The distinction matters, because it explains why he keeps the Bureau deliberately small. He does it for fun, alongside a media day job; for a single show he helps, he might pocket a few thousand NT, sometimes nothing. “As long as I don’t lose money, that’s enough.”
What’s underneath that is a clear value core: culture before business — “70% culture, 30% business,” as he puts it — and dignity before transaction. He builds through relationships rather than contracts, resists the pull to industrialise a scene he loves precisely because it isn’t industrialised, and treats respect — for the players, for the culture, for the audience — as the non-negotiable.
He’s the rare foreign writer you’ll actually run into at a Tuesday-night gig, and the gift he offers Taiwanese artists in return is the same standard he holds himself to: be “Taiwanese enough,” he says, borrowing a phrase from a Sabukaru essay — not traditional by obligation, but “completely modern, in a Taiwanese way.”
