In musicological studies of European classical music, the modern writing of performance reviews has been deemed explicitly patriarchal (McClary 1992, DeNora 1995). Ethnomusicologists critique that this asymmetric power dynamics between masculine writers and the feminized be-written is closely associated with the white-centric meritocracy of individualist creativity and expropriative extraction of the non-Western, resulting in colonization (Cooley & Barz 2008). This paper examines the Performing Arts Critics Program of the National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF) in Taiwan as a negotiating site in which both neocolonial and postcolonial writings intersect. I analyze how such power dynamics in writing have been adopted and institutionalized as a form of state authority that imposes male-centric social elitism in Taiwan’s underground music scenes. With a reflexive ethnographic perspective (Davies 2012), I revisit my engagement in the Performing Arts Critics Program as both a music critic and ethnomusicologist between July 2017 and August 2018. Rather than positioning NCAF as an overtly patriarchal institution, I argue that the program’s productivity regime, which requires contracted fellows to publish twenty articles within a year, embodies a masculine epistemology rooted in colonial notions of efficiency and evaluative authority. This temporal pressure compels writers to prioritize evaluative immediacy over ethnographic reciprocity, reproducing the very extractive logic that ethnomusicology seeks to critique. Through reflexive engagement, I demonstrate how my own complicity within this regime reveals the tension between the ethics of care and the demands of productivity in postcolonial cultural institutions. I propose a performative ethnographic approach that foregrounds reciprocity, care, and collaboration. This paper contributes to reimagining music criticism as an ethnographic practice that challenges the colonial and patriarchal legacies embedded in cultural institutions.