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.

2024 ADAM

Curatorial Statement

Choreographing Theirstories

As one of the few projects in the Asia Pacific Region’s institutional realm dedicated to artistic exchanges, research, and development, this edition’s ADAM Gathering in Taipei is scheduled from 28 August to 1 September, and the related events start on 23 August.

With the notion of Choreographing Theirstories, this edition of ADAM Gathering explores how their-stories can reshape the understanding of contemporary times, and how artists have intertwined and speculated the relational between bodies, places, and stories through movements, actions, and mobility.

For the first time, the critical program ADAM Artist Lab ventures beyond Taiwan. In partnership with BIPAM (Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting), Sasapin Siriwanij joins as Guest Curator, leading the Lab in Bangkok and Taipei with the Taiwanese artist Huang Ding-Yun. Bringing together performing and visual artists from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Germany, and Taiwan, the ADAM Artist Lab dives into cultural, personal, and collective histories, herstories and theirstories of cities, places, and communities through a non-heteronormative lens.

In collaboration with the National Cultural and Arts Foundation of Taiwan, the launch of Curatoké - Performance Curator Academy marks a new avenue for cultivating emerging curatorial practitioners with international mentorship composed by Daniel Blanga Gubbay (Artistic Co-director, Kunstenfestivaldesarts), Jeff Khan (Creative Director, Asia TOPA), Nayse López (Artistic Director, Panorama Festival), Low Kee Hong (Creative Director, Factory International), Rucera Seethal (Artistic Director, National Arts Festival South Africa), and Faith Tan (Director, Programming, Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay, Singapore). Young curators from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia, and Estonia will take ADAM Gathering as a dialogic, research, and learning space as part of the training program.

To perform various creative processes of new projects, the ADAM Kitchen program with international partners features Chunky Move dance company, Gaya de Medeiros, and Emma Maye Gibson among others. Emerging from the 2023 ADAM Artist Lab, Taiwanese First-Nation artist Ciwas Tahos (Anchi Lin) and Japanese choreographer Nanako Matsumoto have extended their encounters and dialogues to collaborate for a new project. Before its premiere in the 2024 Kyoto Experiment, they will present a work-in-progress preview during the ADAM Gathering.

Selected programs of the Taipei Arts Festival during ADAM Gathering such as Su Pinwen’s Leftover Market, Ku Kuang-Yi & Robert Johnson’s Bat Night Market, and Mathilde Monnier’s Black Lights will resonate with the intertextuality of the embodiment and choreography of her-stories and their-stories.

The festival’s curatorial research in residence project Cruising continues to cruise between islands of the Asia Pacific. While Helly Minarti’s project The Sea Within will present the next phase of the work, the curatorial trio of Kyoto Experiment begins the research named Traveling Tongues with artists from Japan, The Philippines, and Taiwan to investigate migration and mobility in the past and now through cuisine, food customs, and cultural Identities. Additionally, a series of dance and theatre showcases will offer international professionals a window into what’s on the Taiwanese performing arts horizon.

Come and be inspired by artists through their fascination with the unknown and questioning. The 8th edition of ADAM Gathering with the selected program of the Taipei Arts Festival celebrates the vivid tapestry of voices that contribute to the vibrant cultural mosaic of our region and beyond, choreographing us in a shared journey of their-stories.

Curator - River Lin

Working with Live Art, dance, and queer culture, Paris-based Taiwanese artist River Lin is Curator of the Taipei Arts Festival, ADAM, Camping Asia and Curatoké: Performance Curator Academy at the Taipei Performing Arts Center. He is also Co-Curator of the Indonesian Dance Festival, Guest-Curator of the 2025 Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, and Guest Co-Editor for the OnCurating's Special Issue. His artistic work has been presented internationally by Centre Pompidou, Centre National de la Danse, Live Art Prize, M+ Museum, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum among others.

Photo Credit by Taipei Performing Arts Center

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.

Curatoké: Performance Curators Academy

Taipei Performing Arts Center is in collaboration with National Culture and Arts Foundation to launch Curatoké: Performance Curators Academy, a new initiative and professional development program for emerging curators working with performance in the fields of performing and visual arts.

Curatoké looks at the curation in contemporary performance including its practices, methods, and studies, and acknowledges that transdisciplinary knowledge and practices of curating performance have become increasingly vital in the institutional realm internationally. To cultivate curators and cultural directorship for the next generation, Curatoké invites emerging curators to join the program, learning from peers and mentors, developing curatorial ideas, and broadening curatorial and cultural horizons.

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.

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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.