Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Using the double imagery of “rocking” and “rock,” this exhibition reflects the drifting circumstances of stateless individuals caught in geopolitics. AU Sow Yee and CHEN Yow-Ruu bring narrative momentum from theater into contemporary art, ingeniously blending various forms of storytelling, including news archives, oral recordings from stateless children, miniature scenes, and musical segments. Starting with Malaysian folk legends, the exhibition immerses the audience in soundscapes interlayered with the virtual and the real, reflecting complex issues of borders and identity. In a compact gallery space rich with vocabulary, the exhibition engages the audience’s perception effectively. The two artists display a subtle concern for different states of survival and existence, even blurring the line between documentary records and artistic expression. (Commentator / CHIANG Fu-Chin) 

Starting in 2023, this trilogy has traced the historical context of the digital world, examining the influence of geopolitics and digital culture. It reveals the global deployment of the semiconductor industry and the system of technological subcontracting. Covering periods from the Cold War to the newer international division of labor under neoliberalism, and the myths surrounding hypermodern industries and cities, the work specifically focuses on severely exploited low-wage workers in labor-intensive industries hidden within global supply chains, often marginalized by gender, race, class, and life circumstances. It critically analyzes complex power structures and cultural formations, such as labor migration and economic-political landscapes. Addressing today’s world amid various crises, this work offers extensive insight, foresight, critical perspective, and active engagement, forming an indisputably significant epic of contemporary culture and technology. (Commentator / CHOW Ling-Chih)

Psychic Theater: Hung-Chih Peng Solo Exhibition / Hung-Chih Peng

Psychic Theater presents Hung-Chih Peng’s artistic endeavor and experimental use of mediumistic techniques. Inspired by three pioneering figures from Taiwan’s theater scene—TIEN Chi-Yuan (1964–1996), CHEN Ming-Tsai (1961–2003), and CHOU Yi-Chang (1948–2016)—the exhibition evokes “clairvoyance” that informs the installation, sound, video, and performance, challenging the perceptual boundaries of existing materials and methods while expanding the narrative and spatial dimensions of life and death, presence and absence, reality and virtuality. It transforms “unfinishedness” into a creative approach that breaks and connects different boundaries, creating an eerie yet beautiful art form that evokes awe through its unique expression. (Commentator / CHENG Sheng-Hua) 

Footprints of the Walker: Tsai Ming-Liang / TSAI Ming-Liang, SIN Song-Yong

TSAI Ming-Liang, like a pilgrim or farmer, cultivates his artistic language between detachment from and engagement with the world. Over thirteen years of dedicated commitment, he has focused on his personal motif, allowing his creative work to branch out organically without bowing to international curatorial trends, fully manifesting the obsessive creativity of an artist. Employing ritualistic language and texts imbued with a religious hue without regressing art to supernatural shamanism or borrowing jargon like “spirituality” or “fieldwork,” the exhibition displays a robust artistic vocabulary that enables the work to emanate a mana-like energy. The curator threads the project meticulously, helping the artist collate thirteen years of documents and tease out the creative context. The finishing touch is the spatial arrangement, which cleverly overlays the temporalities of the films, installations, and performance art, enabling viewers to fully perceive the spiritual path of the “walker.” (Commentator / WU Yi-Hua) 

Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition / LuxuryLogico

Cosmic Sketches showcases LuxuryLogico’s work over the past fifteen years, including public art, participatory projects, and their individual endeavors. In this exhibition, the long-term project, Project Woodpecker, is woven into the space like roots, connecting different projects. They break down, reinterpret, and express the ethos of collective practice across both individual and group works. The largest gallery room features the main piece, 201 Space, which combines light, music, a robotic hand, and driftwood into a harmonious, unmanned theater, not only highlighting the group’s ambition to explore large-scale mechanical art but also conveying a poetic sensibility rooted in the group’s internal life experiences. (Commentator / CHEN Hsiang-Wen)

Phantom Topographies—Chen Chao-Tung Solo Exhibition / CHEN Chao-Tung

CHEN Chao-Tung deconstructs physical quadrants into multiple layers in this exhibition, overlaying them with observational errors that dissolve and reset spatial logic. This results in a realm that resembles reality but defies logic. Meanwhile, it delineates the afterimages of human perception, offset from everyday narratives, amid endless refractions between materiality and space. These spatial replicas, refracted from various objects, lead viewers through different narratives within the space. Elegant installations serve as spatial filters and reshape our perception of the world, marking the deformations and folds in the visual field while transforming lived experience into perceptual recreation. The exhibition reminds us to observe those never-questioned rules in life and explore new possibilities unveiled by sensory experiences caused by dislocations of logic across different thresholds. (Commentator / TSUI Kuang-Yu)

KINGDOM / CHAO Ting-Ting × Anarchy Dance Theater

Beyond simply demonstrating how virtual reality serves as a means to explore memory and visions of the future, KINGDOM employs 3D digital space, images from VR headsets, and the shared space between audience and performers to transport everyone into a meticulously choreographed memory space characterized by a never-ending process of compression and decompression through shifting viewpoints and the design of a seemingly infinite stage, floating in a (private) digital kingdom that is constantly collapsing and being reconstructed. This work relies heavily on the performing team’s high level of coordination, with live sound and visual effects precisely synchronized with the performers’ onstage states. Meanwhile, performers wearing headsets need to enhance their sensory engagement to respond to live audiovisual cues. This exemplifies the fruit of their longstanding collaboration. (Commentator / CHEN Hsiang-Wen) 

Oh! Baby 2025—2025 Taoyuan Iron Rose Festival / Body Phase Studio 

Over the years, Body Phase Studio has continually focused on and laid the foundation for an aesthetic rooted in a sixth sense in art, emphasizing a valuable social aspect. Guided by director YAO Lee-Chun, this work promotes theater as a space where margins and existence can freely unfold. The collaboration between the two performers impresses, evolving from “connecting aphasic bodies” to a vivid realm where desire clashes between life and death. Reversing barriers and constructing subjectivity challenge the cognitive limits imposed by normality, offering freedom within constraints to transcend boundaries and breach discipline through chaotic eros. Amid uncontrolled distortion and discord, this work explores paths to love, from glowing trajectories of light and religious breaths to isolated celebrations and confrontational silences, fostering fierce resilience and vibrant creativity to celebrate life’s hardships and cruelties. (Commentator / CHOW Ling-Chih)

qaqay—2025 Ocean Art Fun / TAI Body Theatre 

TAI Body Theatre’s foot scripts reflect contemporary youth’s encounters with environmental challenges as well as collective migratory and diasporic experiences. It is composed through the collaborative body, engaging in affirmative, sensibility-oriented thinking and land philosophy. Starting with the relationship between the indigenous language and the body, it explores sonic and spatiotemporal dialectics and imaginations rooted in historical narratives. The dancers’ feet, like those of beasts, stamp and create landscape changes and layered temporalities, forming an epic of mountains and forests that convey memories of ancestral spirits and of returning to nature, along with the sorrows therein. Within the consoling power of music and dance, they weave hope and the regenerative forces of life. With heartfelt spiritual depth, this work confronts the challenge of disappearance through dynamic tensions and channels the sounds of all beings and past existences into our bodies, achieving the return of the impossible. (Commentator / CHOW Ling-Chih)

FreeSteps-murmur—2025 Taiwan International Festival of Arts / HORSE SU Wei-Chia

FreeSteps-murmur, as the final chapter of SU Wei-Chia’s FreeSteps series, not only holds significant meaning in that the choreographer performs in it himself, but also illustrates his method of “nearly pulling, entangling, and possessive gaze and sculpting.” Starting with Su’s solo performance under the lights, the work transitions to former dancers CHEN Pei-Yung and FANG Yu-Ting emerging from the darkness as lamp-bearers, transforming what might appear to be a solo dance into scenes of competition, complementarity, and suppression between the soloist and the observers, resembling specters. This artistic exploration of “freedom yet unfree” is deeply entwined with the eternal dilemma haunting a dancer’s body: the struggle and coexistence of physical mastery and an ailing body that is losing control. (Commentator / FAN Xiang-Jun)

Embarking on a Drift to the Unknown—National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) Kaohsiung Local Hi Project / Antinomy Company

Embarking on a Drift to the Unknown combines monologue with carefully woven soundscapes to explore memories of matrilineal transoceanic migration through a theatrical design centered on the auditory experience. The performance emphasizes sonic resonances, spatial cues, and headphone listening, transforming sound into a symbolic system that captures the fluid flow of time and emotional shifts, producing both immediate situations and historical echoes. It turns the most subtle parts of personal memories into immediately perceivable signals. This approach, similar to an adaptive receiver, uses theatrical vocabulary built from sound to challenge reliance on representations of the visible in traditional theater, offering new perspectives for engaging with the work while redefining the idea of presence within the sensory experience. (Commentator / CHANG Yin-Fang)

Macbeth Does a Ritual / Body Phase Studio

A collaboration with director WANG Mo-Lin, this work was written and performed by actor BAEK Dae-Hyun, relying solely on physical expression to create an intense solo performance and achieve an extreme form of self-fulfillment. It continues the series' previous works, grounded in the actor-director framework, to collaboratively explore key theatrical themes—this work not only signifies the ongoing development of the method but also engages with the tensions between Taiwan and the global stage, as well as between Asia and the West. Whether it is the work’s inherent theatricality and performance aesthetics, or the burden, responsibility, and care related to the external world and collective consciousness, this work highlights individuals’ unique stances and values when confronting challenges specific to this era, demonstrating that contemporary theater can serve as a spiritual space for relational politics. (Commentator / Yizai Seah)

Lament of the Wandering Head / Sun Son Theatre

This work begins with questions of individual and collective identity and life struggles, and moves toward theatrical acts of self-analysis and self-pursuit—Sun Son Theatre has a long-standing tradition of rigorous physical and musical training that also brings out its members’ innate talents and perspectives. This fully embodies the theater company’s core value of unifying performance, music, and dance. By exploring the history of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora and the interplay of fate across ancient and modern times through Southeast Asian supernatural legends, the production not only enriches Taiwan’s related performing arts scene but also invites us to reconsider the cognitive gaps between ourselves and others. What seems to be a fixed history of transnational cultural exchange can also be used to readdress unresolved questions about identity and survival through aesthetic creation. (Commentator /Yizai Seah)

Worn Yet Unfolding—2025 NTCH Ideas Lab / YANG Nai-Hsuan (Sunny)

YANG Nai-Hsuan’s Worn Yet Unfolding, compared to the deconstructive, cool-toned approach that emphasizes the physical development of dancers, is rooted in personal life experiences and transformed into a warm, relatable work of empathy. The work focuses on the choreographer’s midlife anxieties and delves deeply into the physical and mental traumas from her youth as she developed her skills. Worn Yet Unfolding avoids self-pity and blame, instead converting the affective power of the dancing body into a critique of the field’s ecology, becoming a passionate embrace that is “worn yet unfolding” over time. The dancer moves repeatedly on and off stage, appearing to regress yet progress, with sound design shifting between near and distant, emphasizing the temporal aspect of being “worn yet unfolding”: without repeatedly bending, folding, falling, and wearing down, the light of warmth and strength may never shine through. (Commentator / FAN Xiang-Jun)

Waterfall II—Jing-Mu KUO Guzheng Recital／KUO Jing-Mu

Jing-Mu KUO Guzheng Recital, starting with guzheng music, reexamines the relationship between the musician, the body, and sound. Through precise communication with multiple composers in the creation of new works, it presents a clear program direction, with dialogues and resonances connecting different pieces through carefully calibrated theatrical methods. The guzheng is more than just a musical instrument; it serves as a medium for reflection on the self and the world, guiding audiences through the musician’s life journey. KUO Jin-Mu uses dramatic techniques to build layered sonic textures, sustaining the tension. This modern take on an instrumental recital opens new possibilities for blending traditional instruments with theatrical performance. (Commentator / CHANG Yin-Fang)