Shu Lea Cheang x Dondon Hounwn: Hagay Dreaming

Stepping out of the mountains into a dream, drifting light and shadow,  forest mist enveloping your body. Let go of prejudice, forget definitions, the first command of Hagay Dreaming will be executed.
This is a ritual that can only happen here and now, a ritual that exists only with your participation.

“Hagay Dreaming effectively erased the boundaries between indigenous tradition and futurism, mixing ancient myths and legends with advanced technologies and visual languages. Ignoring the stereotype of indigenous artwork as traditional crafts, Hagay Dreaming reclaims the speculative, curious, and unconventional quality of cultural and digital technology for developing the possibilities of hypothesis and reinterpretation, applying unpredictable imagination to pre-set binaries of male/female past/present, nature/technology.’”— Felix Stalder, digital culture scholar

“Successfully interlacing ancient mythology with contemporary art, Dreaming Hagay constructs a newly sovereign yet timeless realm. The work radiates positive force, guiding audiences toward the courage, strength, and serenity of cross-disciplinary art.” — Wen-Yi Wang, Chairperson, Taipei Performing Arts Center

“For all its riveting music and clever technology-augmented choreography, this enactment of Hagay Dreaming left viewers desiring something intangible, unspecifiable. Perhaps that is the point. Hounwn and Cheang invited audiences into the enchanting vision of Gaya, prompting reflections on how we might bring the dream to life.”
 — ArtAsiaPacific

“I don’t know what I saw, but I felt like I had a dream—my own dream.”
“A living fantasy of light, dance, music, and chant, leading audiences into an enchanting new realm of performance.”
 — Audience responses from the Tate Modern premiere

Carrying Your Dreams, Entering the Forest

Long ago, legend tells of a hunter who ventured alone into the mountains. Caught in a sudden storm, he took shelter inside a hollow tree and fell into deep sleep. When he awoke, the rain had ceased. Birds and insects sang. Emerging from the cave, he found himself in a beautiful forest shimmering with light. As he wandered, he encountered a group of unclothed beings, embracing and intertwining. They appeared male, yet their presence was graceful and luminous. Curious, the hunter asked, “Who are you?” They replied, “We are Hagay.”

(In Truku culture, “Hagay” refers to men who embody feminine qualities.)
Thus began an exchange—of knowledge, ritual, and wisdom.

A collaboration between Truku ritual bearer, artist Dondon Hounwn and pioneering new media artist Shu Lea Cheang, Hagay Dreaming fuses digital media, moving images, laser art, personal narrative, mythic chants, and Indigenous music and dance.

Rooted in Hounwn’s imagined myth of the hunter and the Hagay spirits, the work integrates the Truku cosmic law of Gaya with the philosophy of Technoshamanism—Shu Lea Cheang integrates technology into the stage design, transforming it into an extension of weaving and ritual, and guiding the audience into a space where ancient wisdom and contemporary society intersect.

A Queer Habitat Where Ancestors and Algorithms Coexist

Cheang reimagines the stage as a living, shifting environment: forests in motion, butterflies in flight, laser beams forming luminous bridges through which Hagay transmit knowledge of weaving and hunting. Motion capture and real-time coding transform duet choreography into a fluid re-articulation of gender multiplicity. The performance culminates in a spiritual light bridge that gathers performers and audiences alike into the realm of Gaya, guiding them out of the forest-dream toward renewal.

As Hounwn states, technology here is not a tool but a modern shamanic device—an intermediary that links myth and code, land and data, tradition and futurity. The work proposes an indigenous vision of the future that resists dominant Western techno-narratives, while simultaneously offering a spiritual and embodied space for non-normative gendered bodies and queer lived experience.

A Theatre Navigated by Technology

Laser artist Aka Chang, drawing from Truku mythological texts, constructs the Spirit Light Bridge, using beams and reflective diamond-shaped ancestral patterns to visualize the flow of Gaya and the guardianship of ancestral spirits.

Meanwhile, the mountain forests and caves described in the text are rendered by stage designer Cheng Hsien-Yu, who envelops intersecting water-mist curtains with forest light and shadow. This creates a mysterious, ambiguous spirit realm in which digital signals and oral traditions converge, opening a perceptual passage on stage.
The performance is further animated by music, dance, lighting, and costume design. Vocalist Kumu Basaw, whose voice channels song, culture, and life itself, weaves traditional and contemporary soundscapes.Under the guidance of Elug Art Corner, they learn traditional Truku music, dance, and chants, as well as traditional instruments from the Tongmen community. These elements are woven into contemporary theatre performance and performance art, offering a distinctive interpretation of Truku rituals and musical traditions. The work injects fresh and profound perspectives into Indigenous bodily imagery and expressive languages, bridging tradition and contemporaneity.

It also brings together outstanding creators from diverse fields, including lighting designer 何定宗, costume designer Chen Shao-Yen, and composer and performer Sayun Chang. Each contributes their own lived experiences and aesthetic expertise to this dreamscape, allowing Hagay Dreaming to unfold not as a straight, linear journey, but as a meandering convergence drawn from the collective unconscious. Crossing geographies and time, myth becomes present. Audiences are invited to follow a branching path—within a dreamlike dream—to discover their own voice and remain in a state of continual becoming.

From Fragmented Narratives to a Global Cultural Journey

In 2025, Dondon Hounwn and Shu Lea Cheang jointly led their team from the Truku community of Dowmung in Taiwan to Tate Modern in London — a sacred temple of modern civilisation and contemporary art. With ancestral spirits invoked in collective prayer, cultures beyond national borders converged here, colliding in a shared ritual space.

“That night, light drifted like mist. The audience stood quietly within the dream we had woven—a ritual without dialogue, yet full of sound. From the village to Tate, this was not a linear journey, but circles of ripples expanding outward.”
 — Dondon Hounwn

Hagay Dreaming first took shape in late 2020 at Lab Kill Lab. Over the past five years, the work has evolved through multiple incarnations: outdoor performances in Dowmung community in Hualien and along the Danube River in Linz, Austria; an indoor work-in-progress presentation at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts during the 2022 Taiwan Biennial; the first staged theatre version presented in Taipei in 2023; and the Living Gaya Dreaming Hagay cultural exchange tour across Switzerland and Denmark in late summer 2024.

Five years after its initial conception, the work reached the final stage of completing its full-scale theatre version. The complete production premiered in March 2025 at the Dance Reflection festival of Tate Modern, London. After journeying across continents, the work will finally return home in 2026, marking its Taiwan premiere at Taipei Performing Arts Center.

Premiering its full theatrical version at Tate Modern in March 2025, Hagay Dreaming: A Forest Encounter returns in 2026 to Taiwan for its local premiere at Taipei Performing Arts Center. This is a ritual of cultural repair and spiritual reconstruction. Audiences do not need to fully “understand” Hagay Dreaming; instead, they may sense a longing for the heart to reunite with the land. There is no urgency to clarify or define meanings here—your embodied presence becomes a clue in itself, pointing toward how one might find their own path, their own voice.

[Artists Introduction]

Shu Lea Cheang

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose practice spans multiple media, including film, video, installation, and network-based art. Her work critically examines ethnic stereotyping, sexual politics, popular media, institutional power structures, and human life in the age of digital information.

Her landmark work BRANDON (1998–99) was the first internet artwork commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2019, she represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale with the mixed media installation 3x3x6. In 2020, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to produce UKI, a viral alternative-reality science fiction film, which premiered at Filmfest München in June 2023 and subsequently toured internationally. In 2024, she was awarded the LG Guggenheim Award in recognition of her visionary engagement with emerging technologies and their broader social impact.

Since 2020, she has initiated the project Lab Kill Lab and led the creation of Hagay Dreaming, serving as the director of its theatrical version.

Dondon Hounwn (Truku)

“I am still hunting — I hunt the human soul, using creativity instead of a hunting knife.”

Dondon Hounwn is a Truku  artist from Dowmung Village, serving as a bridge between the spiritual and human worlds, the Indigenous community and contemporary art, and tradition and the present. He is a practitioner and transmitter of traditional jaw harp music, songs, and rituals, while also working across performance art, video art, and environmental and site-specific theatre.

As the founder of Elug Art Corner, he leads youths from diverse Indigenous communities in exploring innovative ways to transmit and transform Indigenous culture. In recent years, he has served as curator of GAYA:Transmigrating in the Contemporary (2025), Msqun(2022), and as chief curator of mapaluktnbarah, the alliance exhibition of the Pulima Art Festival (2021). He began the creation of Hagay Dreaming in 2020.