From Life of Galileo to the I Ching_ Creation as Sustained Observation

Unlike other lectures focused on theoretical analysis, theater director Wei-lien Wang's "Galileo Project" is not a one-off production. It is a ten-year theatrical infrastructure project engineered around Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece, Life of Galileo.

Wang recalled directing Brechtian epics like Mother Courage and Her Children during the early days of Taipei's Huashan 1914 Creative Park , back when the space still offered experimental friction. Over time, however, he realized that a creator's scarcest resource is not funding, but uninterrupted time.

"My father and grandfather both died at sixty," said Wang. Realizing he might have merely twenty prime years left to create, Wang adopted a ten-year scale for his work. Rather than letting his rhythm be fragmented by venue seasons and endless grant cycles, he chose a sustained, long-term focus to buy back genuine creative autonomy.

This calculus gave rise to the "Galileo Project." Structurally, the project operates as a triad of overlapping concerns: Aesthetic Inspiration, Textual Liberation, and Civilizational Reflection, with Life of Galileo anchoring the core.

"As creators, we are always confronting the contemporary," Wang noted. For him, Brecht projected himself heavily onto the character of Galileo; the text itself was revised across decades, bearing the scars of a creator wrestling with his era.

Consequently, the project looks past the historical biography of Galileo Galilei to interrogate the birth of the modern world itself. It asks instead: How does the Renaissance continue to reshape contemporary thought and society after five centuries?

For Wang, the Renaissance launched more than a scientific revolution; it fundamentally redefined the relationships between knowledge, ethics, power, and humanity. Today, the tightening grip between technology and state power in AI and autonomous drone warfare renders Life of Galileo urgently contemporary.

Yet Wang bypasses purely macro critiques of institutional oppression. "Most people dissect Galileo through mathematics and Vatican politics, but to me, the human interaction matters more." He emphasizes "empathetic critique," arguing that Brechtian theater demands internal self-scrutiny from the creator, not just an assault on external structures, and through goodwill and repetition.

This internal search led Wang to Eastern philosophy. In 2014, seeking to elevate his artistic practice, he paused production entirely to study Analects of Confucius, the I Ching, and Chinese philosophy, actively trying to loosen the grip of his Western intellectual training.

Through Eastern philosophy, he discovered an unexpected bridge back to Brecht. In his twilight years, Brecht was deeply drawn to Lao Tzu and even framed his late work as "dialectical theater." However, Wang notes that the dialectics of the I Ching diverge from Western philosophical dialectics (die Dialektik). It illustrates a state of constant flux, transformation, and mutual generation; a worldview where fortune and misfortune are inseparable.

"Humans change; humans are ambiguous," Wang observed. The humanism of the Renaissance was not the rigid, institutionalized humanitarianism that followed. Its true power lay in placing a volatile, contradictory human back at the center of the universe.

This philosophical shift dictates Wang's approach to the stage. Theater should not tell just a story; it must expose how stories are told, unpacking the structure of narration and the mechanics of observation. This defines his concept of "textual liberation": theater does not replicate a classic text; it violently re-establishes its relationship to contemporary society.

Wang concluded the lecture with his own poetic couplet: "The planetarium governs the secular world; human emotion reflects the starry sky." Ultimately, the stage exists to remind us how humans exist within the world: how we observe, feel, and inevitably reflect one another.