Never Fake It #002
Never Fake It is an independent print magazine based between Taipei and Toronto, created by a collective of education and arts workers, and existing to subvert the regime of rigor — the classist, colonial, and arbitrary value system that crowns the institutional art world as the sole arbiter of meaning, while disregarding the brilliance thriving in basements, warehouses, community spaces, and dance floors. Our pages reject the hierarchy that separates scholar from stick-and-poker, curator from club kid, critic from creator. The mission is simple but radical: to rave inside the ivory tower and bring the scholars to the streets. Never Fake It becomes a site of gathering for the alienated and the othered — a convergence of subcultural fringes into something shared and sovereign. Through art, writing, and dialogue, we explore placemaking as a radical act of reclamation — a way to mark the world that once marked us, and to shape it, at last, to fit us as we are. Never Fake It believes knowledge is a communal pulse, not a credential; creativity, a collective rhythm, not a commodity. In an era of imitation, we insist on the real, the raw, the restless. Never fake it. Ever.
in this issue:
“Perhaphs home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” - James Baldwin
In the era of “late” stage capitalism’s algorithmic grip — where identities splinter under the weight of endless categorization and subcategorization, where cultures polarized and divided erode into isolation — Never Fake It’s second issue turns its attention to the idea of place. As the borders between work and life blur and spaces of culture and belonging continue to vanish, we ask what it means to make and inhabit a place today. Refusing the narrow, geographic notion of place upheld by the control systems that alienate us from it, this issue reimagines “home” through Baldwin’s lens: as cultural, corporeal, and ideological terrain. Never Fake It becomes a site of gathering for the alienated and the othered — a convergence of subcultural fringes into something shared and sovereign. Through art, writing, and dialogue, we explore placemaking as a radical act of reclamation — a way to mark the world that once marked us, and to shape it, at last, to fit us as we are.
Toronto/Taipei, 28 x 21.5cm, 240 pages, Spring/Summer 2025