ADAM

Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance

Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM) was launched by Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC) in 2017 with River Lin serving as curator. Unlike other platforms that focus on program selection and market, ADAM centers upon artists’ creative development; through exchange, collaboration, and cross-cultural dialogue, we carry on building connections and a network of Asian contemporary performing arts, searching for possibilities for artistic creation from dialogues.

Entering its ninth year in 2026, ADAM continues its artist-led approach and focuses on the three main sections, including the ADAM Artist Lab, ADAM Kitchen, and ADAM Assembly. Artists, curators, and performing artists from across Asia are invited to Taipei, where they meet each other in different forms as they create, research, and initiate dialogues.

This year, the ADAM Artist Lab is co-curated by the Filipino artist Ness Roque and the Taiwanese artist Lee Ming-Chen. Seven artists from different Asian countries are invited to participate in a two-city residency in Manila and Taipei. In migration and each other’s company, they learn about the cultural context of where the others come from and open up the possibility for encounters and dialogues between cities. The ADAM Kitchen focuses on the works-in-progress, allowing the artists to showcase the interim results of cross-cultural exchanges. The ADAM Assembly provides artists and curators with a platform on which they meet and share their experiences, creating a network of art practice and knowledge production.

ADAM is not only an annual international gathering but an open platform that allows artists to meet each other and their artistic creation to continue developing. This year, we look forward to seeing our partners from all over the world again in Taipei and together, we watch, think, and initiate new collaboration opportunities.

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.

2026 ADAM

Curatorial Statement

Holding Situationships

Since 2017, ADAM has continued to ask not only whether artists can create together within a short-term residency, but also what conditions an institution can create for artists from different cultural and creative contexts to meet, work together, and give time to ideas that have yet to take form. Following a period of pause and reflection, ADAM returns to this question in 2026, further loosening the institutional tendency to predetermine artistic directions, methods, and outcomes.

This is the point of departure for Holding Situationships. Here, a situationship is not an undefined relationship waiting to be formalised. It is a relation produced through particular times, places, and encounters, and kept open so that it can continue to transform. Holding is not an act of control, but one of carrying and sustaining: allowing a relation to pause, change direction, depart, and perhaps return in another moment, city, or role.

Across 2024 and 2025, Taipei Arts Festival and Kyoto Experiment convened artists for Cruising: Traveling Tongues. Moving between the dining table and the rehearsal room, food, cooking, language, history, and identity turned everyday life together into a way of learning about one another. Extending this collaboration, I invited Filipino artist Ness Roque and Taiwanese theatre director Lee Ming-Chen to co-curate and facilitate the 2026 ADAM Artist Lab.

Placing the Lab in the hands of artists is an experiment in artist-curating. How might artists’ creative methods, ways of sensing, and relational practices become curatorial means of assembling encounters, research, and public sharing? Through this experiment, ADAM approaches “Asia” both as a geographical imagination to be tested and as a question that must continually be reopened.

Roque and Lee propose "Laundry Days", transforming the acts of sorting, soaking, washing, drying, hanging, and folding into a shared way of working. Washing does not mean restoring something to purity or erasing its stains. The traces left on clothes instead register where bodies have been, and the relationships with others and their environments that cannot be completely washed away. The Lab unfolds in phases across Manila and Taipei: questions and relationships encountered in one city carry over to the other, continuing to change through movement, waiting, and coming together again.

Alongside the Artist Lab, ADAM Kitchen continues to support works that are still taking shape. Amrita Hepi, who participated in the 2024 Bangkok–Taipei Artist Lab, returns to ADAM with Destiny (the small view), developed from research undertaken during that two-city residency. Her return shows that a public sharing does not have to mark the end of a collaboration. An earlier encounter can be revisited when an artist arrives at a new question and needs new conditions to pursue it.

This year, ADAM also brings together curators from Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe, creating a space in Taipei where curatorial cultures and practices from different geographical and institutional contexts can enter into dialogue. Among them is playwright and director Natsuki Ishigami, Artistic Director for the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center’s 2026 Season. She participated in the ADAM Artist Lab as an artist in 2018 and returned as its guest curator in 2019. Now returning to Taipei in her role at SPAC, she enables us to look back at ADAM’s development and to recognise how a relationship can shift roles and take on new directions over time.

Relationships already in motion come together again, at different rhythms and through changing roles. ADAM 2026 is concerned not only with how artistic processes begin, but also with how dialogue continues after an encounter. These public sharings are not final outcomes but what Indonesian dance curator Nia Agustina calls "titik-titik perhentian"—temporary stopping points that make artistic processes visible while making room for further questions and relationships to enter.

Perhaps “Asia Discovers Asia” has never meant the discovery of an already defined geographical region. It takes place through repeated encounters and returns—through recognising the traces we carry from one another and considering how we might continue to hold them together.

Curator｜River Lin

© TR Concept and Visual Atelier

Working in Live Art, dance, and queer culture, River Lin is an artist, curator, and dramaturg based in Paris, Tokyo, and Taipei. He served as curator at the 2023-2025 Taipei Arts Festival. Collaborating with the Taipei Performing Arts Center, he has been curating ADAM and Camping Asia since 2017. His performance work has been presented at Para Site and M+ in Hong Kong, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Live Art Prize in Finland, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipation, Centre National de la Danse in France and others. He is also a co-curator of the Indonesian Dance Festival and a guest-curator of the 2025 Biennale de la Danse de Lyon. Currently, Lin is pursuing a PhD in Art Studies and Curatorial Practices at the Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts.

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.

Kitchen

The 'ADAM 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.

平台計畫/國際結盟/亞當計畫/2026/新作探索/新作探索-5 《曲解莎劇》及《卡啦OK》/《曲解莎劇》及《卡啦OK》 History Play & Karaoke 600_400

Assembly

As a platform for performing the knowledge and producing curatorial and artistic discourses of our times, the 'ADAM 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.

Opening Performance

The vivid underneath is quietly disappearing.
The land is hill green, tree green.
The green seen in the park or on the green screen.

Can we build on vanishing ground?

In La XXX Punk II: Betel Nut Green, Amis artist Fangas Nayaw takes "Indigenous Punk" to speculate on a near future where Taiwan's Indigenous cultures have vanished. Part I begins from a fictional customary law. Part II translates the kinetic energy of traditional dance into a manifesto—weaving, through music, dance, and body, a history yet to come.

Premiered at the 2025 Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, the work looks back at Amis traditions and communal life, while striving to imagine a future from the traces quietly disappearing.

Collaborative & Supportive Institutions

WestK Performing Arts

KYOTO EXPERIMENT