Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn – interview: ‘Hagay Dreaming continually evolves and pushes forward through performance’

Speaking during rehearsals, Cheang and Hounwn reflect on the sources of inspiration for the project, on the developmental curve from its inception to its first full theatrical performance at Tate, what audiences might expect and what messages are being transmitted

Hagay Dreaming, according to its project director, Shu Lea Cheang, an acclaimed American Taiwanese artist and film-maker, is a “technofantasia”. Cheang has produced the work for, and with Dondon Hounwn, an artist from the Truku tribe, one of the indigenous groups officially recognised in Taiwan. Much of this tribe’s land in Taroko national park, in the north-east of the island, is undisturbed wilderness, with high mountains, deep river gorges, astonishing rock formations and a wide diversity of flora and fauna. More than 300 species of butterflies can be found within the park.

The Truku people, meanwhile, have highly developed skills in weaving, a theme that finds its way into the theatrical construction of this project, as does their elaborate patterns of tattooing and belief in the living presence of ancestral spirits. Hounwn, a practising shaman, has become known for his cross-gender and cross-generational aesthetics, fusing art and ritual as a form of cultural activism. Working on various levels, using the potential of laser light to expand the theatrical frame into a network of multiplicities, through and within which a fluidity of movements is occurring, the project carries the audience into a world of juxtapositions and boundary-crossings, between the body and the spirit, between genders and between the natural and the cosmological. A ritualistic weaving together of light and shadow along with chanting, choreography and music, makes for a powerful field of transmission between the ancient and the contemporary.

Known as a net art pioneer, and for exceptional works since the 1980s that combined innovation in film and new media with socially engaged issues, in 2019, Cheang represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale. In 2024, she became the second recipient of the LG Guggenheim award for art and technology, and the first institutional survey exhibition of her work is at the Haus der Kunst in Munich until 3 August. As she reflects here in interview with Hounwn, the work grew out of their first encounter in a laboratory-workshop in Taiwan five years ago, when he first told her the story of Hagay’s dreaming.

Hagay Dreaming is presented in collaboration with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef and Arpels, taking place across London, from 12 March to 8 April 2025.

Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn: Hagay Dreaming
Tate Modern, London
7.30 pm on 13, 14 and 15 March 2025
(In addition, there is an artists’ talk with Shu Lea Cheang, Dondon Hounwn and Ping-Yi Chen on 12 March and an artists’ Xchange Movement Workshop on 16 March.)

Interview by BRONAĊ FERRAN
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY & ANNA OVENDEN
Transcription and Translation from Chinese by AOIFE CANTRILL