Taiwan
The 24th Taishin Arts Award, one of Taiwan’s most significant prizes for contemporary art, announced its three winners at the ceremony held on May 30, 2026, selecting laureates from 16 shortlisted works cross the visual and performing arts. Respected theater critic Cheng-Hsi Chen chaired this year’s final jury committee, which included art critic Tai-Song Chen; curator and dramaturg Ling-Chih Chow; Sheng-Hua Cheng, 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 3.5 million NT, were presented during the ceremony as follows:
Visual Arts Award
Cosmic Sketches—The LuxuryLogico Exhibition by LuxuryLogico
Jury’s comments for the award
Through the exhibition Cosmic Sketches, LuxuryLogico (Yi Chen, Geng-Hwa Chang, Kun-Ying Lin, and the late Keng-Hau Chang [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.
Performing Arts Award
Oh! Baby 2025 by Body Phase Studio
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 Lee-Chun Yao, the piece opens with an encounter between two performers, Sung-Kuk Kang from Korea and Pei-Hsuan Peng 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.
Annual Grand Prize
qaqay by TAI Body Theatre
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 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.
For more details on the shortlisted and winning works, visit the 24th Taishin Arts Award website here.
