The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Annual Grand Prize: qaqay by TAI Body Theatre. Photo by LIN Yen-Shao.
TAI Body Theatre won the Annual Grand Prize of the 24th Taishin Arts Awards, announced in Taipei on May 30. The company received NTD 1.5 million for qaqay, a work that draws on indigenous language and physicality. LuxuryLogico received the Visual Arts Prize for Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition, while Body Phase Studio received the Performing Arts Prize for Oh! Baby 2025, with both winners receiving NTD 1 million. The three laureates were selected from 16 shortlisted projects across the visual and performing arts.
Established in 2002, the Taishin Arts Award is one of Taiwan’s most prestigious honors in the fields of contemporary art and culture. It recognizes outstanding works of performing arts, visual arts, and transdisciplinary art presented in Taiwan during the previous year.
Taken together, the awarded works attest to the vitality of contemporary art in Taiwan as it transcends media and disciplinary boundaries — a technological dialogue between kinetic installation and the natural world, an inquiry into the social body on the contemporary stage, and a bodily practice grounded in indigenous tradition and natural history. Distinct in form and approach, each work turns toward self-examination while voicing a shared concern for the present.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Annual Grand Prize: qaqay by TAI Body Theatre. Photo by LIN Yen-Shao.
TAI Body Theatre earned the top prize for qaqay, presented at the 2025 Ocean Art Fun in Hualien. Through its foot-scripts, the work traces a shifting landscape, the sedimentation of time, and a philosophy of the land, drawing on indigenous language and physicality. Staged within the Ji’an Tobacco Factory — a site of powerful spatial and historical resonance — it excavates forgotten narratives of diaspora and invites audiences to attend to the murmurs and stamping that reverberate through the mountains and forests. At its core, the work is a spiritual reckoning. Confronting the agonizing reality of cultural erasure, the troupe turns to music and dance as instruments of recovery, bridging living memory and tradition while forging a singular creative aesthetic. The result is a work that honors the past while looking toward the future: resilient, regenerative, and alive despite the seeming impossibility of return.
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.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Visual Arts Award: Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition. Featured artwork: Hard, Hard. Photo by WANG Shih-Pang (ANPIS FOTO); courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei.
The Visual Arts Award went to LuxuryLogico for Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Founded in 2010, the collective — CHEN Yi, CHANG Geng-Hwa, LIN Kun-Ying, and the late CHANG Keng-Hau (1980–2018) — used the exhibition to bring together fifteen years of cross-disciplinary practice shaped by mutual inspiration, hard-won solidarity, and a persistent engagement with spatial, technical, and creative constraints. Fifteen interlaced yet independent works—some archival, others recreated, and still others newly produced—were assembled into a cosmic theater that took shape on site. Running through them is a profound sense of humanity, a concern for the fraying ties between people, nature, and society, and a conviction that art might help mend them. Within a cultural landscape saturated by technology, the jury noted, the group sustains “an affective kinetic poetics” that remains warm and resolute beyond the reach of the contemporary digital present.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Performing Arts Award: Oh! Baby 2025 by Body Phase Studio. Photo by HSU Ping.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award – Performing Arts Award: Oh! Baby 2025 by Body Phase Studio. Photo by HSU Ping.
The Performing Arts Award went to Body Phase Studio for Oh! Baby 2025, presented at the 2025 Taoyuan Iron Rose Festival. The piece continues the company’s rare, dedicated focus on the possibilities and limitations of the body. Directed by YAO Lee-Chun, it opens with an encounter between two performers—KANG Sung-Kuk from Korea and PENG Pei-Hsuan from Taiwan—who transform the stage into a site where energy and desire collide, unleashing a chaotic eros marked by resilience and creativity. Both moving and thought-provoking, the work overturns assumptions about the unconventional body while foregrounding the construction of subjectivity. In doing so, it reexamines how disability is defined and affirms what remains possible within it. The jury described the piece as “a hymn to the harsh realities of life.”
Chaired by theater critic CHEN Cheng-Hsi, this year’s final jury committee also included art critic CHEN Tai-Song; curator and dramaturg CHOW Ling-Chih; CHENG Sheng-Hua, 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, dramaturg at the SPAC-Shizuoka Performing Arts Center in Japan; and Robin Peckham, curator and incoming executive director of the JD Museum in Shenzhen.
Full details on the winning and shortlisted works are available on the official website of the 24th Taishin Arts Award.
The 24th Taishin Arts Award: Group photo of the three award laureates, the final jury committee, the nominators, and the board of directors of the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture.