Taitung Fringe Festival
a performing arts retrospective
An Unrepeatable Art Experiment: Co-Creating with the Environment
In Taitung, performances often unfold in environments that resist full control. Wind, light, sound, and passersby continually seep in, shifting the rhythm of each work. When the stage is no longer a closed space but an ever-changing field, every occurrence becomes an unrepeatable present.
The Taitung Fringe Festival grew from this condition. It is an artistic initiative rooted in environmental theatre and experimental practice, where mountains and sea become the stage, and body and space shape each other. Since 2020, audiences have been invited outdoors to encounter performances in streets, settlements, and natural landscapes In doing so, find themselves drawn into the work, completing the live moment alongside the performers.
Yet these works exist only within a particular moment in a particular year, and then dissolve. Images and text may preserve traces, but they cannot recover the air, the temperature, or the sense of physical presence — the essential qualities of liveness. A live moment can never be fully reconstituted.
This exhibition makes no attempt at reconstruction. Instead, it begins with sui-piàn: fragments of memory, images not yet whole. As you move through the space and pick up each fragment, new connections emerge between them, and something like experience is generated once more.
Here, you are not merely a viewer. You are one of the conditions that makes everything possible.
How to Use the Sui-piàn
In this exhibition, you are part of what makes the image whole.
The wall before you marks a site where performances once took place. Each sui-piàn carries traces of performers’ bodies and memories of those moments — fragments still waiting to be assembled.
To begin, pick up a sui-piàn from the rack on the back wall and locate its coordinate on the floor (e.g. 22.3 — 120.5). Find the matching coordinate, stand on the corresponding dot, and hold the sui-piàn toward the framed area on the wall. When the angle and distance align, the images converge before your eyes: scene and body meet, and the fragment comes alive.
Feel free to move, adjust, and try again. Each new alignment may reveal something different. Through this process, you take part in completing a performance moment that once existed.
You are invited to participate in this act of summoning. The reconstruction is yours to make.
If you need assistance, a staff member will be happy to guide you through your first alignment.
Chapter 1 -
The Stage That Moves, the Audience That Becomes the View
When the stage starts moving, we become part of the scenery
When the boundaries of theater dissolve, the line between performer and audience begins to blur. We no longer sit still and watch; we step inside, moving with the work through shifting environments. A train window becomes a frame, the sway of the carriage becomes rhythm, and wind, light, and sound quietly take part in the scene.
Here, the stage refuses to stay in place. It might be carried into a forest where shadows shift with the wind, or moved toward the shoreline where waves seem to take on a choreographic presence. It might even appear inside a train carriage, where movement itself becomes part of the structure of the work. The backdrop is never fixed; it travels with us.
In this condition, art is not something placed before us. It moves between bodies and surroundings, asking to be experienced rather than observed. Each encounter is co-shaped by land, weather, and presence, fragile, unrepeatable, and fully alive.
Chapter 2 -
Listen ,Water Is Telling a Story
Learning to Receive a Story Through the Body
Some stories do not arrive as narrative; they arrive as sensation. In Taitung, water is never still. It runs through the land, seeps into paths, and shifts the way the body moves through space.
When performance enters these watery environments, watching becomes unstable. You may find yourself standing at the edge, or already inside it without noticing. The ground softens, perception shifts, and the body begins to negotiate its own position again.
Sound, humidity, wind, and uneven terrain become part of the work. Even in the absence of water, its traces remain in dryness, in residue, in a kind of pressure left behind. What is no longer visible continues to shape how the body remembers movement.
Here, water is not background. It is presence, subtle, persistent, and shared. What happens between the body and the environment is never fixed, but constantly taking shape.
Chapter 3 -
Old Stories, New Life
When a Space Awakens, Memory Begins to Speak Again
When performance enters a forgotten building or an ordinary corner of daily life, the space begins to shift. It is no longer a container of history, but something that briefly holds two times at once.
Layers of past and present overlap without settling. A gesture in the present may echo something no longer visible, while what remains of the space quietly alters how it is seen.
Memory here is not preserved; it is activated. It appears through movement, attention, and proximity. What is seen is never stable, because it depends on how the body enters the space.
Nothing is reconstructed. Instead, something is briefly made present again, not as fact, but as sensation.
Chapter 4 -
Everyday Encounters
Turn a Corner, and Something Begins
Art does not always announce itself. Sometimes it appears in places already familiar, a street corner, a park bench, a path used without thinking.
In these moments, daily life does not pause. It continues, but something shifts slightly in its rhythm. A small gathering forms, someone slows down, someone else looks twice. A performance emerges without separating itself from its surroundings.
What is usually unnoticed becomes temporarily visible: footsteps, breath, distance, hesitation. These are not background details; they are part of how the moment holds together.
Nothing is framed in advance. Meaning forms in real time, shaped by attention and movement. And then it passes, leaving only the feeling that something briefly took place.
Chapter 5 -
When Taitung Becomes a Way of Living
On Staying, Leaving, and Looking Back
Some people leave Taitung and return to it through memory. Others remain and experience it from within, as something unfolding over time rather than standing still.
Life here moves at a different pace, shaped by weather, distance, and repetition. Work does not separate itself easily from daily routines. It is entangled with walking, eating, waiting, and watching the sea.
For many artists, making work here is less about searching for inspiration than about adjusting how one lives. Practice becomes inseparable from living conditions, and creation emerges from that ongoing negotiation.
What is produced carries traces of this process, not as a statement, but as lived experience. Its refinement comes not from polish, but from proximity — to time, to place, and to the body.
Chapter 6 -
Theater, Rewritten by Place
When the Rules Begin to Shift
Once performance steps outside fixed formats, it begins to take unfamiliar forms. It may appear unexpectedly, without clear boundaries or entry points.
Some works resemble games; others unfold like shifting situations without instructions. What holds them together is not structure, but attention: how participants choose to look, move, and respond.
Because these works depend on specific conditions, place, time, and presence, they cannot be repeated in the same way. Each instance exists only once, then disappears.
In that instability, something opens. Perception becomes active rather than passive, and what we call theater begins to expand beyond its usual frame.
