The 24th Taishin Arts Award Announced
Three Award Winners
TAI Body Theatre's qaqay echoes the voice of the land with its "foot-script" and brings home the Annual Grand Prize
LuxuryLogico's Cosmic Sketches transcends technology through its humanistic care and wins the Visual Arts Award
Body Phase Studio's Oh! Baby 2025 shapes an atypical body aesthetic and receives the Performing Arts Award
The 24th Taishin Arts Award: Group photo of the three major award laureates. From left to right: PENG Pei-Hsuan, KANG Sung-Kuk, YAO Lee-Chun, Watan Tusi, CHEN Yi, CHANG Geng-Hwa, and LIN Kun-Ying
The 24th Taishin Arts Award, one of Taiwan’s most significant prizes for contemporary art, announced its three winners at a ceremony held on May 30th, 2026, selecting laureates from 16 shortlisted works cross the visual and performing arts. Respected theater critic CHEN Cheng-Hsi chaired this year’s final jury committee, which included art critic CHEN Tai-Song; curator and dramaturg CHOW Ling-Chih; CHENG Sheng-Hua, an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Tainan University of Technology; Elisabeth Millqvist, Director of the Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden; Yoshiji Yokoyama, a dramaturg at SPAC-Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, Japan; and Robin Peckham, an American curator and upcoming executive director of the JD Museum in Shenzhen. After three days of intensive deliberation, the jury committee selected the three laureates. The awards, with cash prizes totaling NT$3.5 million, were presented during the ceremony as follows:
Visual Arts Award (Prize: NT$1 million)
Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition by LuxuryLogico
Jury’s Comments for the Award:
Through the exhibition Cosmic Sketches, LuxuryLogico (CHEN Yi, CHANG Geng-Hwa, LIN Kun-Ying, and the late CHANG Keng-Hau [1980–2018]) showcase their achievements in 15 years of cross-disciplinary practice built on mutual inspiration and hard-won solidarity. Founded in 2010, the collective has consistently worked within spatial, technical, and creative constraints. Fifteen interlaced yet independent works—some archival, others recreated, and still others brand new—are brought together in a cosmic theater that evolves on site. What unifies them is a profound sense of humanity, a preoccupation with the fraying bonds between man, nature, and society, and the conviction that art can mend them. Within a cultural landscape saturated by technology, the group offers an affective kinetic poetics that persists, warmly and resolutely, beyond the overwhelming reach of the contemporary digital world.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award: Board Director SHIH Jui-jen (right) of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture presents the Visual Arts Award to LuxuryLogico for its solo exhibition, Cosmic Sketches. (From left to right: LIN Kun-Ying, CHEN Yi, and CHANG Geng-Hwa)
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Visual Arts Award: Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition. Featured artwork: Mindhand. Photo by WANG Shih-Pang (ANPIS FOTO); courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
Performing Arts Award (Prize: NT$1 million)
Oh! Baby 2025 by Body Phase Studio (2025 Taoyuan Iron Rose Festival)
Jury’s Comments for the Award:
Oh! Baby 2025 continues Body Phase Studio’s rare and dedicated focus on the possibilities and limitations of the body. Under the directorship of YAO Lee-Chun, the piece opens with an encounter between two performers, KANG Sung-Kuk from Korea and PENG Pei-Hsuan from Taiwan. They transform the theater into a site of collision between energy and desire, unleashing a chaotic eros with resilience and creativity. What emerges is both moving and thought-provoking, a reexamination of how impairment is defined and an affirmation of what remains possible therein. By overturning assumptions about the unorthodox body and foregrounding the construction of subjectivity, Oh! Baby 2025 becomes a hymn to the harsh realities of life.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award: Board Director WU Jing-Jyi (right) of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture presents the Performing Arts Award to Body Phase Studio for Oh! Baby 2025. (From left to right: TSAI Chia-Feng, Gin FENG, KANG Sung-Kuk, PENG Pei-Hsuan, and YAO Lee-Chun)
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Performing Arts Award: Oh! Baby 2025 by Body Phase Studio. Photo by HSU Ping
Annual Grand Prize (Prize: NT$1.5 million)
qaqay by TAI Body Theatre (2025 Ocean Art Fun )
Jury’s Comments for the Award:
The foot-scripts of TAI Body Theatre’s qaqay trace the shifting landscape, the sedimentation of time, and the philosophy of land by drawing on indigenous language and physicality. Staged within the Ji’an Tobacco Factory, a site with powerful spatial and historical resonance, the work excavates forgotten narratives of diaspora and provokes us to listen for murmurs and stomps that reverberate in the mountains and forests. This is, at its core, a spiritual reckoning. Confronting the agonizing reality of cultural erasure, the troupe turns to music and dance as instruments of recovery, bridging living memory with tradition and forging a singular creative aesthetic. The result is a work that pays homage to the past while looking toward the future: resilient, regenerative, and alive, despite the seeming impossibility of return.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award: Board Director LIN Mun-Lee (right) of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture presents the Annual Grand Prize to TAI Body Theatre for qaqay. (From left to right: Qaulai Tjivuljavus, Piya Talaliman, CHU Ke-Yuan, LIN Chihyu, and Watan Tusi)
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Annual Grand Prize: qaqay by TAI Body Theatre. Photo by LIN Yen-Shao
The award-winning works showcase the powerful vitality of Taiwanese contemporary art that transcends media and disciplinary boundaries. They range from technological dialogues between kinetic installations and the natural environment to in-depth explorations of the social body in contemporary theater and bodily practices rooted in indigenous cultural traditions and natural history. Each winner within this diverse range reflects a unique sense of self-inquiry and expresses care and concern for our time.
In his opening remarks, Simon CHENG, Chairman of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, noted that this year’s 16 shortlisted works featured several outstanding transnational collaborations between Taiwan and other countries, including Malaysia and South Korea. He pointed out that these projects demonstrate that contemporary art does not seek a single standard answer. Instead, through emotional and critical tension, it expresses a range of perspectives, creating a vibrant chorus of diverse voices.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award: Group photo of the three award laureates, the final jury committee, the nominators, and the board members of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture
On behalf of the final jury committee, Jury Chair CHEN Cheng-Hsi expressed heartfelt respect and gratitude to all artists, both present and absent. He emphasized that through their work, artists show a powerful will to resist forgetfulness, overcome limitations, and push creative boundaries. Their efforts enrich the concept of “freedom,” broaden the horizons of artistic practice, offer countless audiences rewarding visual and auditory experiences, and foster a collective imagination of beauty and resilience in life during this era of turmoil.
This year’s ceremony was designed and organized by theater director SUE Yung-Chuen of How To Eat Faust and hosted by Karolyn Kieke, a bilingual host and performer for film, television, and theater. The event featured a distinctive performance by musician and theater artist TSENG Po-Hao, who wove this year’s shortlisted works into a creative musical narrative. By blending traditional Taiwanese “liam-kua” (Chant-song) with contemporary sound techniques, the performance delivered a captivating audio experience that honored traditional arts while embracing contemporary innovation.
At the 24th Taishin Arts Award ceremony, music and theater artist TSENG Po-Hao wove this year’s shortlisted works into a performance that blended traditional Taiwanese “liam-kua” (Chant-song) with contemporary sound creation
For more details on the shortlisted and winning works, visit the dedicated “24th Taishin Arts Award” page on the official website of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture: https://www.taishinart.org.tw/en/art-award-year-news/2025
Livestream recording of the award ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ecEeUQkC2g
Facebook page of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture: https://www.facebook.com/TAISHINART/
