關於About

Fields: visual culture, performance studies, intercultural theater production, creative writing, and stage directing.

I have never managed to tell research and making apart. Knowledge tells me which way to walk into a subject; critical method decides where I stand once I am there; writing and rehearsal are what feeling does when it finally gets up and acts.

Everyone now agrees that art cannot be taught, and the art market could not be happier about it. On this view a work is worth something because it is excellent and successful, and since neither excellence nor success can be cultivated, there is nothing to do but wait for the rare accident. The consensus is harder to dismantle than it looks, because it is really two claims welded together, and the worldviews behind them are nearly a hundred years apart.

The first is the cult of talent. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), T. S. Eliot insists that tradition cannot be inherited; if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. What we call individual talent is a position that becomes visible inside the order of existing works, not a gift that was there before the order was. If that is so, the ability to make things can perfectly well be described, taught, and examined.

The second is the cult of competition, which treats the successful work as the winner of a contest in which the fittest survive. My counterexample is the matsutake. In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), Anna Tsing points out that the matsutake does not grow in virgin forest. It grows on disturbed ground, in woods that have been logged and abandoned. It cannot be farmed, yet it needs the damage people leave behind; it is what comes after planning fails, not what planning achieves. From this Tsing derives the idea of salvage accumulation: capital picking up value from processes it cannot control. The matsutake sells for a fortune and still cannot be manufactured.

I recognize my own work in both places at once. Art is not something capital produces, yet it is graded and traded in the same market, and the ground it grows on is the secondary woodland left by consumption, culling, and failure. The rehearsal that got thrown away, the draft that went wrong, the show that ran once and never again: these are not stations on the way to success. They are the forest. A work is what is left over, not what won. Which is why remembrance, of all things, is what keeps me working.

I took my Ph.D. in Literature at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, in 2016, and have taught at universities since 2017. Teaching has kept changing my mind about what to study. My posts have been, in order, the Department of Arts and Creative Industries at National Dong Hwa University, the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Creative Application at National Chung Cheng University, the Master’s Program in Performing Arts and Creation at Tunghai University, and the Graduate Institute of Children’s Literature at National Taitung University. Four disciplines, and each time the same question had to be told again in another language and another culture. Wherever the retelling would not go through, that was exactly where my understanding of the culture gave out. So the object of study kept moving. In the years among craft and product designers I worked on copying and notation, which became “Copy is Original: About Kazuo Ohno and Notation,” Arts Review 43 (2022), pp. 31–84 (THCI): it takes Takao Kawaguchi’s 2013 solo as its object, traces the postwar avant-garde’s line of descent through Tatsumi Hijikata’s translation and understanding of kabuki, and examines how onnagata performance and the moving image notate each other. In the institute of Taiwan literature the question became how to reassess the history of popular theater: on May 20, 2022, I presented “Popular Theater before the Lifting of Martial Law Revisited: Rereading Li Qiao’s Lan Caixia’s Spring” at National Tsing Hua University, later revised for the volume The Many Faces of Li Qiao (Taipei: Wanjuanlou, 2023), pp. 399–436; a related paper, “Leaving the Register and Literati Violence: A Question in the Intellectual History of Xiqu,” was given at Chinese Culture University on May 14, 2021.

Since I arrived at the Graduate Institute of Children’s Literature, my attention has walked out of the theater and into the gallery. In March 2025 the Children’s Art Education Center of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum showed Concrete Zoo by Chiu Chen-Hung (b. 1983): a herd of concrete animals installed in the 1980s in Meilun Mountain Park, Hualien, dug up when the park was rebuilt, restored without a fresh coat of paint, their exposed rebar left as it was found, and twenty-four of them set on new plinths in a V formation. I began with the artist himself: “The Theatricality of Concrete Zoo: A Conversation with Chiu Chen-Hung in Dachen Village” appeared in Bamboo Dragonfly: Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture (December 2025), and on October 24–25 of that year I presented “Nonverbal Violence: The Spectatorial Relation in Concrete Zoo” at National Taitung University. Out of these came the journal article “The Theatricality of Concrete Zoo: Animality and the Ethical Space of Beholding the Other,” The Sculpture Research Semiyearly 35. It starts from the two spectatorial paradigms, political and ontological, that Emma Willis sets apart in Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and picks up a second thread in the animality Artaud came away with after watching Balinese dance at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. Neither, I argue, explains where a visitor actually stands in front of those animals, so the article proposes a “third theatricality,” one judged by the ethics of the flesh rather than by representation or symbol, and locates the beholder on three axes: how one perceives (through language or through the senses), where one looks from (the sovereign gaze or the state of being pulled along), and the tense of one’s willing suspension of disbelief (a past that is finished or a present still being made). The most recent essay, “‘The Beautiful Youth as Somebody Else’s Problem’: A Reflexive Study of Writing Kua-á Pó-gio̍k,” is practice-led research that reads one xiqu script against its own themes, sources, and methods.

My courses are about making things, and about studying how things get made. Along that line I have changed my method three times.

The first method used my own subjects as raw material. The syllabus for Introduction to the Arts, which I taught at National Dong Hwa University in the fall of 2017, put down as its course material the dozen or so theater pieces I had made over fifteen years, together with the books they came from. Developing Artistic Creativity, taught in the same period (fall 2017 and fall 2018), was built from six figures: the widow, the demoness, the comfort woman, the sent-down girl, the woman writer, and the schoolmistress. They were the very women my own plays had been about, and the students, through physical workshops, took them as models to copy. What students saw at that stage was how one working artist actually works, and what they walked away with was a method they could take to pieces.

The second method turned the tables and asked students to set their own subjects. Interdisciplinary Creation, at Tunghai University in the fall of 2022, took “one’s own research” as its spine, and students started by picking a subject out of a childhood scene. Interdisciplinary Creation I, the following fall, was about the distance between a subject and its form: students built solo performances under the heading of disenchantment, while trying to find out what Agamben’s bare life feels like in practice.

The third method, since I came to National Taitung University in 2024, presupposes neither a medium nor a body. Playwriting for Children’s Theater is made up of three units, Animals, Props, and Nonsense, and none of the three is after a plot; students have nowhere to start but the material in front of them. In the same period I brought the camera into the studio, beginning with the shock of first-year students meeting Taitung for the first time. On April 11, 2026, that course design received the First-Year Experience 50 Award from the Ministry of Education’s Competency-Oriented Higher Education Learning Innovation Program, shared with Professor Mitsuda Yayoi.

The full list of courses taught is on the CV page.

As of August 2026 I have supervised exactly one master’s thesis: Chou Yi-Hsien, Pokémon: The Final Battle 2037, a Study in Playwriting, Master’s Program in Performing Arts and Creation, Tunghai University, 2023 (spring semester, academic year 2022–23). The thesis is a play plus an account of writing it. In the play, a playwright accused of plagiarizing her work The Pokémon’s Dream walks into the world of Pokémon to clear her name, and loses in court anyway. The research half deals with her motives and surveys the literature, which runs from comics studies in Taiwanese design scholarship and comics narratology in communication studies to the debate in contemporary Japanese performing arts that puts plagiarism at its center. That last field is the one my 2022 essay “Copy is Original: About Kazuo Ohno and Notation” (Arts Review 43) belongs to, and that is where our conversations started.

Apart from supervising, between 2021 and 2026 I sat on seventeen master’s thesis committees: at home in the Graduate Institute of Children’s Literature, National Taitung University, and elsewhere in the Department of Arts and Creative Industries at National Dong Hwa University (including its in-service master’s program and its ethnic arts division), the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Creative Application at National Chung Cheng University, and the Master’s Program in Performing Arts and Creation at Tunghai University. Most were artist’s statements and studies of creative practice, in video, painting, mixed media, textiles, dance, playwriting, and children’s and young adult literature.

I am a stage director, and I treat everyone I work with as an actor on stage. That is also how I treat students. A director’s job is not to give orders. It is to see: to notice the moment someone is stuck, and the moment someone is only pretending not to be. So when I work with you, what I keep an eye on is how you are, not how far you have got. I distrust authority, I respect freedom, and I do not run people on pressure or lost sleep. I do care about discipline, because whether a person can keep working, and keep wanting to, over the long run matters enormously, and discipline is how you keep it up; it has nothing to do with obeying anyone. For the same reason I will not contact you after ten at night or before ten in the morning. Your life, and your sleep, count as much as the work.

In creative work I will push you to solve your own problems, and I will be your first reader and your first audience. In research I will be strict, and I hope you will pick up the habits of keeping your files, listening, and reading slowly. If you are still looking for a direction and have no subject yet, that is fine too. My advice will be to stop weighing what is useful against what is useless, what interests you against what does not, and to start with what you feel, so that you get some of your feeling back.

Fair warning: I am not one for small talk, I do not smile when we are discussing work, and I look stern. That is what concentrating looks like on me. It is not coldness, and you need not read anything into my face. Bring me something you actually want to make and actually care about, and you will have all of my attention. We can skip the pleasantries. Tell me what you want to do and how you got here, and we can sit down on the floor and start.

(One thing on the side: I am a Gemini with Sagittarius rising. If you read charts, you can probably guess where I contradict myself: curious yet distant, an idealist who keeps pouring cold water on his own ideas. Believe it or not, as you like. Consider it one more clue.)

Most of the plays I write begin with a woman history has misplaced: Ciao Ci Chao, Lady Macbeth, Bai Su Zhen, Adamantina, Pó-gio̍k, Ma Xianglan. In the books they come from they are conclusions; I tend to work backward and ask how they got there. Formally, I let performers of Taiwanese opera and Peking opera sing exactly as they were trained to, and take away the story that used to wrap around the singing, so that a character is herself, the person telling her own story, and the person other people tell stories about, all at the same time. Since Ciao Ci Chao (premiered 2005; quarterly nominee and finalist, Taishin Arts Award, 2006) the method has carried through Bai Su Zhen (2007, Taishin quarterly nominee), Liuˇ Samˊ Moi (2008, Hakka TV; Golden Bell Award for Best Art Direction), Tsio̍h-siù (2015, Taishin quarterly nominee), Ian-tshing (2016, Taishin quarterly nominee), Lady Macbeth (premiered 2016; Taishin quarterly nominee 2018), Khóo Sian (2018), Adamantina (2020), Lady Orchid (2022), Pó-gio̍k (2022), and Forgery of Zhong Kui (2024).

The most practical difficulty of the work is that it lives between two sets of values. Opera performers and people from modern theater do not agree on what it means to do a show well. The first judge by role type, by codified technique, and by whom you studied with; the second by concept, structure, and interpretation. Getting both sides to agree inside a single production is very hard, and in the long run most productions end up leaning one way or the other. The institutional difficulty is filing. In the traditional-opera drawer my work is not traditional enough; in the modern-theater drawer it is not modern enough; and the existing boxes for grants, awards, and reviews never quite fit.

There is a further difficulty, and it is the director’s chair itself. The profession still argues over what a director is supposed to be, and the argument mostly takes the form of waiting: waiting for someone to turn up who can decide everything in one go, carry every responsibility, and make everyone feel safe. I call this father anxiety. I do not believe such a person exists, and I have no plans to play him. From the rehearsal room to the stage, I insist on working one to one.

Two questions in the work are still open, and neither is a question of craft. First, is being a performer a job or an identity? Second, is making and performing a way of earning a living or a way of finding out who you are? I deal with both in my research; in the rehearsal room I run into them again every single time. The pleasure of the work has nothing to do with either. It comes from the audience being there and reacting, and from the fan in me getting moved by his own show.

Performing abroad began in 2007, and the first three engagements all fell in that one year: Ciao Ci Chao went to the International Contemporary Theater Season in Beijing and then to the Asian Contemporary Theatre Festival at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, and Bai Su Zhen was invited to the Chinese Cities Youth Theatre Festival in Beijing. In 2009 Auntie and Her Stewards returned to the same Beijing festival. In 2010 Ciao Ci Chao: A Widow on Display played the Asian Performing Arts Festival in Tokyo. The busiest year was 2011: Marie Educates His Son at Virgin Flower Falling went to the Beijing Fringe Festival, and Ciao Ci Chao was invited to both the first Chengdu International Theatre Festival and the first Chengdu Biennale. The Chinese engagements continued from there: Ciao Ci Chao at the COART Environmental Art Festival in Lijiang, Yunnan (2012); Charlotte at the Asian Contemporary Theatre Festival in Shanghai (2013); Ciao Ci Chao at the Chengdu Art Theater’s winter season and at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival (2014); The Hunchback of Dali at COART in Dali, Yunnan, and Lady Macbeth at the third Contemporary Xiqu Festival for Small Theaters in Beijing (2016); Ciao Ci Chao back at that Beijing festival and Khóo Sian at the Changjiang Theatre, the former Carlton, in Shanghai (2018); and in 2019 both Lady Macbeth and Ciao Ci Chao at the eleventh Oriental Masters and Masterpieces Month of the Shanghai Oriental Art Center.

Two cross-border projects were not invitations but my own doing. “The Boy, One Arm, Crystal Fantasy: The Yasunari Kawabata Trilogy” (2012–2014) was funded by the Saison Foundation’s three-year international co-production program. The Japanese playwright-director Seiji Nozoe, the butoh dancer Mirei Yamagata, and I each adapted one Kawabata story, swapped Japanese and Taiwanese performers between us, and rehearsed and performed at Morishita Studio in Tokyo, in Taipei, and in Shanghai, twenty-four performances in all, including the 2014 showings at Komaba Agora Theater in Tokyo and at the Asian Contemporary Theatre Festival in Shanghai. In the same years “Ciao Ci Chao on the Road” (2011–2012) took the show out of theaters altogether: to the Canglang Pavilion in Suzhou, a century-old house in Shuhe, Yunnan, the canal at Wuzhen, the old street of Sanxia, Wulai, and Tamsui. In 2012 I also co-produced the musical Blanche with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre: thirty-two performances in the first run, after five months of rehearsal.

Research and exchange started earlier still. In 2005 I held the inaugural Wanderer Project grant of the Cloud Gate Culture and Arts Foundation, with Tokyo as my base; in 2008 I was invited to Poetry International at the Southbank Centre in London; in 2016 and again in 2025 I served on the jury for the Asian Cultural Council’s Taiwan fellowships, and on November 4, 2025, Lady Orchid was invited to the council’s “Alchemy of Brilliancy” series marking thirty years of ACC Taiwan, at the Globe Playhouse of the Taipei Performing Arts Center. Two things that were never part of any plan decided the next ten years of my work: going to Beijing to learn Peking opera arias and interview Sun Yumin, the great performer of the Xun school, and meeting the kabuki onnagata Kochō of the Sōzan school in Asakusa, Tokyo.