Indigenous Collective Confronting Cultural Erasure Wins Taiwan’s Top Art Prize

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TAI Body Theatre, the Indigenous-led performance collective founded in 2013 by Truku choreographer Watan Tusi, has been named Grand Prize winner at Taiwan’s leading annual ceremony honouring contemporary visual and performing arts, the Taishin Arts Awards.

The collective, which received a prize of $1.5 million TWD (approximately £35,400), was selected from 16 finalists identified via a year-long survey by nine nominators. The awards were adjudicated by a seven-member jury that included curators Elisabeth Millqvist, Robin Peckham, and Chou Ling-Chih, alongside critic Chen Tai-Sung.

Discussing TAI Body Theatre’s winning work, the jury said: “Within the consoling power of music and dance, they weave hope and the regenerative forces of life. With heartfelt spiritual depth, this work confronts the challenge of disappearance through dynamic tensions and channels the sounds of all beings and past existences into our bodies, achieving the return of the impossible.”

Watan is known for his distinctive system of “foot scripts”, which maps the rhythms of dancing and labouring bodies. Emerging alongside a generation of Indigenous artists moving beyond questions of representation, the group has developed site-responsive works that weave together dance, labour, migration and lived histories, often through long-term collaborations with migrant worker communities across Taiwan. 

Their winning work, qaqay, takes its title from the Truku word for foot and papak, an onomatopoeic term evoking the sound of animal paws. Drawing on an origin myth in which a fallen giant’s body became the mountains and its feet scattered into islands, the performance was staged at the former Japanese-built tobacco factory in Hualien, where the collective is based.

During the work, through stomping rhythms and choreographed movement, the dancers gradually reassemble the giant’s body as a living landscape. The jury praised the work for “confronting the agonising reality of cultural erasure” while opening a path towards cultural renewal.

The $1 million TWD (approximately £23,600) Performing Arts Award went to Oh! Baby 2025 by Body Phase Studio, a duet featuring Korean artist Kang Seung-guk and Taiwanese performer Peng Pei-hsuan. Described by the jury as evolving from “connecting aphasic bodies” into a charged arena of desire, vulnerability and subject formation, the work challenges normative understandings of disability.

The Visual Arts Award (also $1 million TWD/£23,600) was presented to LuxuryLogico for Cosmic Sketching, a survey at Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art in late 2025 revisiting the collective’s 15-year practice. At its centre was 201 Space, an immersive environment of light, a robotic arm, sound and driftwood that transformed machine aesthetics into something unexpectedly poetic.