Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury’s Comments for the Annual Shortlist Award Winner

This combination of a Taiwanese director and Macau performers re-interpreted the autobiographical masterpiece of the American playwright, Eugene O’Neill. The work fully demonstrated the sense of intimacy and aloofness, as well as, the gloom and distortion in a home, creating a dialogue between deep, personal emotions dramatized in the Western classic, while beckoning at the situation of Taiwan.

An air of death prevailed in the entire performance, as if the dripping water was counting down to the end and eating away the desolation. The monologic dialogues distanced the characters from each other; the movements evoked a membrane-like confinement, depicting the difficulty of intimacy. The deformed, wild psychological quality of the core maternal protagonist in the performance symbolized her love and sin. This play not only responded to the self-redemption in O’Neill’s work, it also echoed the spiritual existence and nationalistic concerns that WANG Mo-Lin’s oeuvre has always addressed.

Comments on the Finalist

Could it be possible that the Western classics need us more than we need them? This work answered this question with powerful intensity. WANG Mo-Lin explored Eugene O’Neill’s correspondence, poetry, and diary, and unearthed a national spirit that was murkier than the family ghost in the original work. In the theater, he used the spatiality of a deathly house and the possessed body to construct a sensibility of death that made the audience hold their breath even more than the domestic conflict in the work did. Through his interpretation of the classic, Wall of Fog was not just a tragedy of a collapsing family, or an allegory about the breakdown of a nation, but a chronicle of death that has recorded the collective demise in an information-exploded age devoid of sensibility. As the play was O’Neill’s profession of bittersweet affection for family, Wall of Fog was WANG Mo-Lin’s confession for Taiwan. (Commentator: KUO Liang-Ting)

Artwork Introdution

The Body Phase Studio is a revolutionary non-profit Taiwanese arts group dedicated to international cultural exchange. It was founded by Wang Mo-Lin, a pioneer of independent theatre in Taiwan. Since its establishment in 1991 till today, by hosting various international arts festivals and theatrical productions, it has enabled Taiwanese artists to exchange aesthetic ideas and perspectives with their international counterparts. It can be said the studio has opened a window to the world for local theatre professionals following the Independent Theatre Movement of the 80s. 

About the Artist

What is "Home"? In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the autobiographical masterwork by celebrated American playwright Eugene O’Neill and "a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood", the Noble laureate exposes us to the nature of "Home": Home—the co-existence of mutual reliance and struggle, of difficult love and solid hate; Home—a place of complex relationships and affairs, a place you know well but sometimes want to escape.

In 2013, the 60th anniversary of O’Neill’s death, Taiwan theatre director Wang Mo-lin re-examined his classics and biographies, and produced a whole new text Wall of Fog performed in the 2013 Macao Arts Festival. Along with a cast and crew from Taiwan and Macao, Wang presents us with unique performing aesthetic and an opportunity for intellectual introspection, initiating a brand new dialogue between audience and stage. Aside from the strong sense of detachment and psychological isolation, it also tells the most subtle understanding of the quintessence of this long-lived play.