2026 TAF: Wang Mo-lin "Epilogues"

6.15 (Mon.) 12:00 Paid Member Pre-sale

6.22 (Mon.) 12:00 Official On-sale

Epilogues features Wang Mo-lin , now in his later years, appearing on stage in person. The work unfolds as a theatrical document performance, anchored in the final recorded interview of his late friend Zhuo Ming.

As a second-generation waishengren (Mainlander) born and raised in postwar Taiwan, Wang’s formative years took him from Tainan—the island’s historic former capital—to Taipei. There, he grew into what his mother described as a youth “without fear of consequence.” Confronted with his unruly, Nezha-like rebellious energy, his father sent him to a political warfare cadet school, where he underwent strict military discipline. It was through this institutional trajectory that, in the early 1970s, he met his senior Zhuo Ming, who would later become a lifelong artistic comrade as both entered the turbulent emergence of Taiwan’s Little Theatre movement.

Over more than four decades, anyone who sustained attention to Taiwanese theatre and cultural activism inevitably encounters Wang’s presence. His trajectory cuts across multiple social movements, marked by a persistent vitality and a series of encounters, frictions, and collisions with diverse artistic fields. As a pioneering and still-active figure of Taiwan’s Little Theatre movement, Wang has developed a distinct trajectory across both discourse and performance.

With advancing age and the gradual decline of the physical body, the breadth of his actions may have narrowed, yet his intellectual inquiry continues to deepen. He remains actively engaged in understanding different generations, while constantly revising or dismantling the outdated frameworks he has come to recognize within himself.

“Creative freedom has always been an expression of the self. Yet the symbolic function of this lump of dried excrement expresses a hollowing out of spiritual energy, leaving the self reduced to a mere bodily gesture. The dialectical relation between world and body becomes alienated into a relation between world and excrement, fundamentally incapable of sustaining any resistance through internal spiritual force.” (Wang Mo-lin)

Since directing 'Mom, Bye' in 2010, performed by two Korean actors, Wang has undertaken sustained research into the significance of the actor’s corporeality on stage. Through cross-cultural practice and varied performance conditions, he has accumulated extensive insights. His work not only examines how directing can deepen the actor’s performance and interweave the processes of writing, directing, and acting into a cohesive stage form, but also, through inter-Asian exchanges, increasingly focuses on the proposition that “melancholy is a form of power.” This perspective probes the traumas carried across East Asia since the 1980s—whether physical or psychological—rooted in Cold War memory, and sedimented over time into an inescapable condition of spiritual melancholy and solitude.

In this work, Wang constructs a text that merges autobiography, criticism, and archival documentation, reorganizing historical contexts and reflecting on visible temporal nodes on stage. It traces the imprints—marks and wounds—left on people and material objects, as well as the lingering thoughts that permeate the world, seeping into its fissures and refusing to dissipate. This complex undertaking begins with Zhuo Ming’s testimony and unfolds through ongoing dialogues with contemporaries such as Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁), assembling a cross-generational ensemble whose creative spectrum generates a collective meditation on the present.

Epilogues also stands as a sincere milestone work for the Body Phase Studio, founded by Wang in 1991, marking a journey spanning over four decades.

Photo credit: Hsu Ping

Wang Mo-lin

Wang Mo-lin was born in Tainan in 1949. At the age of eighteen, he was admitted to the drama department of Fu Hsing Kang College. After graduation, he served in the military for ten years, and after retiring at the rank of major, went to Tokyo from 1982 to 1984 to study sho-gekijo, literally little theatre, and Butoh dance. He was deeply inspired by Yasuo Yuasa's notion of body, which became the core of his future observations and discourse. After returning to Taiwan, he worked as a journalist for two years at Ren Jian magazine. In 1987 soon after martial law was lifted, he planned the environmental theater event October, which was performed on the site of disused structures near the sea, and then in 1988, presented Taiwan's first action theater work, Driving Evil Spirits off Lanyu Island. In 1991, Wang established Body Phase Studio, which promoted performance art in Taiwan by planning the International Performance Art Festival. From 2005 to 2008, he served as the artistic director of Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre. Wang has directed many plays, including the Black Hole series and Solo Shakespeare Project, and authored Portrait of Post-Showa Japan, Urban Theater and the Body and On the Taiwanese Body.
Wang Molin's work combines social movements with action theater to challenge the mainstream and resist mechanisms that continue to dominate the individual and body. Through his works and writings about contemporary Taiwanese theater, Wang has established a foothold in theater as social practice and cultural movement, and constructed his work's unique aesthetic framework and dialectical view of history. His long-term theater practice continues with a sustained critical spirit, showing the significance of the times without compromise.

Body Phase Studio

The Body Phase Studio is a revolutionary non-profit Taiwanese arts group dedicated to international cultural exchange. It was founded by Wang Mo-Lin, a pioneer of independent theatre in Taiwan. Since its establishment in 1991 till today, by hosting various international arts festivals and theatrical productions, it has enabled Taiwanese artists to exchange aesthetic ideas and perspectives with their international counterparts. It can be said the studio has opened a window to the world for local theatre professionals following the Independent Theatre Movement of the 80s. In 2005, founding the Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre Executive Committee, the arts group consistently advocates the convergence, interaction and opinionating of different groups holding the same contemporary spirit.