ADAM

Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance

The Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM) was launched by the Taipei Performing Arts Center in 2017. It is a network gathering event that places artists at the core, and aims to create a new arts platform in the Asia-Pacific region (including New Zealand and Australia), which allows artists to connect with each other and share resources. It hopes to facilitate transnational artistic creation, giving young artists broad and continuous opportunities for exchanging ideas. ADAM believes in "Asia Discovers Asia." With creators at the core, we can work together with presenters, art festivals, and curators across the Asia-Pacific region to pool resources for co-creation and performance tours. This will allow us to establish an Asia-Pacific contemporary arts network.

In the past few decades, exchange between presenters, curators, and producers have increased in frequency through performing arts markets, particularly in Asia and Europe. Connecting, collaborating and sharing resources between various arts networks has become the norm in global cultural industries and markets. As international collaboration mindsets become more institutionalized and formalized, artists must play a more important role in the industrial framework. The Taipei Performing Arts Center believes that the operating foundation for ADAM and our cultural responsibility as a public theater is to deepen exchange and collaboration between artists, create a friendly creative environment for artists, help artists develop their professional networks, and provide a more transparent and open platform mechanism.

Asia's diverse cultural backdrop and Taiwan's democracy, freedom, and abundant artistic energy has allowed ADAM to become an artist-focused network. The Taipei Performing Arts Center will pool resources and partner presenters with creators and performers in the Asia-Pacific region, facilitating international exchange among artists. This includes co-commissioning, co-producing, performance tours, artist-in-residence programs, and research schemes. ADAM transcends political and economic barriers and crosses the boundaries of performing and visual arts. Artists from all over the world and from all disciplines can come together to learn more about Asian culture and develop their future plans.

ADAM is committed to:
1. Supporting international collaboration and exchange among artists and facilitating friendly dialogue between artists and institutions.
2. Considering and working within the context of arts, culture, and societal engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
3. Working together with partners and being open to proposals for cooperation from other arts networks and organizations.

As a shared network, the Taipei Performing Arts Center will invite partner presenters from nations in the Asia-Pacific region to discuss future blueprints and organizational operations for ADAM. Under a long-term strategic alliance, ADAM will become an entry point for cross-network collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region.

News about ADAM

2023 ADAM

Curatorial Statement

Think Like an Ecosystem

The 2023 ADAM is back.

Returning to organizing the in-person gathering on an international scale has concerned the internet of humans and things to work together as a networked body. Therefore, ADAM invites reflection on cultural production in post-pandemic conditions and how arts institutions could work with ecological thinking.

ADAM presents ‘Think Like an Ecosystem’, proposing possibilities of worldview shifts and ecological art through avenues of contemporary performance.

Taiwanese First-Nation visual artist Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) and performing artist Chen Chen join hands to curate ADAM’s critical program Artist Lab, entitled ‘Watering Intimacy’. Learning from water and oceanic politics, artists Sorour Darabi (Iran/Germany & France), Gok-Lim Finch (Australia), Daniel Hellmann (Switzerland), Hsieh Chieh-Ting (Taiwan), Ihot Sinlay Cihek (Taiwan), Victor Kinjo (Brazil), Quỳnh Lâm (Vietnam), Nanako Matsumoto (Japan), Prumsodun Ok (United States/Cambodia), Yuka Seki (Japan), Natasha Tontey (Indonesia) and Louie Zalk-Neale (New Zealand) will collectively run one-month residency dedicated to the notion of queer ecology to speculate the biodiversity of ecosystems and indigenous knowledge. Together they will kick off the ADAM Gathering program through their findings and sharing.

ADAM’s Kitchen continues to support artists’ research and work in progress that looking at cross-cultural dialogues. M(Other)hood: A Collective Lecture by Scarlet Yu Mei Wah and Tung I-Fen takes mothering and otherhood as performance method to demonstrate an ecosystem of becoming mothers. A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe by Wu Chi-Yu and Rikey Tenn revisits hidden histories of how the national ideology of Taiwan has formed through colonial process of the 20th Century. New blood Leu Wijee in collaboration with Mio Ishida and Hung Wei-Ling presents Museum II: Ridden considering the artist’s body as a museum and the museum-space of body as the nature.

In conjunction with the 2023 Taipei Arts Festival, ADAM Gathering co-presents a keynote talk Faiva Haka; Art of Cultural Action by Latai Taumoepeau, and some key programs The Rite of Lobster by Chen Yu-Dien and Feng Cheng-Tsung, Sun & Sea by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, Ocean Island Mine by Lata Taumoepeau, Bat Banquet by Ku Kuang-Yi and Robert Charles Johnson, Louver/Shutter/Blinds/Hundred Leaves by Lee Ming-Chen, and Mt Jade is in Metamorphoses by lololol, Shin Hanagata and Wang Yu-Jun.

To inaugurate Cruising, the new curatorial residency program of Taipei Arts Festival, Jogjakarta-based dance curator and dramaturg Helly Minarti will work with artists Ginoe, Watan Tusi, and Sayaka Uehara on the oceanic thinking and present their research at the ADAM Gathering.

Like water, like islands, like trees, like bees. Think like an ecosystem. Acknowledging ecosystems.

Curator

River Lin

River Lin is a performance artist and curator working across the contexts of dance, visual art and queer culture. He stages live works in gallery settings as choreography, installation, encounters or situations to speculate notions of revisiting art history, heteronormative constructions, social engagement and performativity of mediums.

He is Shortlisted Artist for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art in 2022. His work has been presented by Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipations, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), Tokyo Real Underground Festival, the KANAL Centre Pompidou and KAAI Theatre (Brussels), Live Art Development Agency (London), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), the Rockbund Art Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum (Shanghai), the 2020 Taiwan Biennial, the 2016 Taipei Biennial and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab among others.

In 2017, he initiated ADAM with Taipei Performing Arts Center and in 2019 Camping Asia in collaboration with Centre National de la Danse. His recent co-curatorial projects include The Non-fungible Body festival by Upper Austria State Museum in Linz, BLEED in Australia and the 2022 Indonesian Dance Festival. Born in 1984, he lives and works between Paris and Taipei.

From the 2023’s edition, River is Curator of Taipei Arts Festival.

http://riverlin.art

Photo by Chloé Magdelaine- Lafayette Anticipations

Artist Lab

The ‘ADAM Artist Lab’ invites the artists to be guest curators for further realizing the ‘artist-led’ concept and practice of ADAM. It brings together international artists, through open call or invitation process, to convene in Taiwan and take part in a monthly collective research residency targeting different themes. Their interim findings are shared through presentations during ADAM Gathering.

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Kitchen

The ‘ADAM's Kitchen’ showcases the work-in-progress presentations, it encourages and supports the creative process of artists' research, development and try-out, particularly those involving cross-cultural exchanges.

Assembly

As a platform for performing the knowledge and producing curatorial and artistic discourses of our times, the ‘ADAM’s Assembly’ brings visual artists, performing artists and curators together to think, debate and respond to current issues and socially diverse voices in the art world through a series of talks, workshops and dialogues.