Curating Publicness: A Case Study of the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival

2025 年 6 月 2 日

SPECIAL ISSUE
It’s Us, Not You: Curatorial Notes on the 6^th Asia Triennial Manchester

Yi-Wei Keng
Translated by Joanna J. Chung

What can be shown, cannot be said.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

When Meg Stuart, an American choreographer based in Europe, was asked about the difference between a good and bad creative process, she responded: “A bad process is one leading to a breakdown of trust and mutual respect, and unwillingness to try proposals. It is when there is no space to play, when intention is buried before being articulated. It is also about a lack of curiosity, intensity, and willingness to make an effort, to push your initial ideas.¹” To me, the same applies to curating. A flawed curatorial process similarly fails to create space for play and the development of ideas between curators and artists. This is also why I prefer that the process not be dominated by an excessively predetermined curatorial concept when starting out — it can inhibit the curator’s ability to remain open to alternative artistic approaches or to recognize the potential in unexpected practices and artists.

In the following essay, I will explore how a curatorial process grounded in inductive reasoning can play an active role in shaping a major arts festival celebrating a city’s 400th anniversary. This approach did not begin with a fixed concept or theoretical framework, allowing the curator to create a space of play that encourages artistic creativity. Ultimately, this process gives rise to diverse forms of public engagement, which can be understood through four distinct modes of participation.

Inductive Curating as Reflective Judgment

¹ Meg Stuart, Let’s Not to Get Used to This Space– Works 2008-2023. Paris: Les Presses Du Reel, 2024. p.428

Theater directors often adopt one of two approaches. The first is deductive: beginning with a concept or theory, the production naturally unfolds as a realization of that pre-existing framework. The second is inductive: the director begins with the concrete details that emerge in the rehearsal space, gradually uncovering the thematic core of the work through accumulation and experimentation. In his 1939 essay The Attitude of the Rehearsal Director (in the Inductive Process), German director Bertolt Brecht wrote: “The rehearsal director does not enter the theatre here with an ‘idea’, a ‘vision’, a block plan and a finished set design. He does not wish to realize an idea. His task is to stimulate and organize the productivity of the actors (musicians, painters, and so on). He does not understand rehearsing as the repeated drilling of something that is set in his head from the outset. Instead, he understands it as trying something out. He must insist that each of the several alternatives be considered.²”

Curating, too, can be approached through either a deductive or inductive approach. If we look closely, we notice that deductive curating is more prevalent in visual arts and museum contexts, especially where there are substantial collections to work with, or in smaller-scale performing arts festivals. These curatorial models often draw on existing artworks or art movements and use theory or thematic propositions to generate new interpretive frameworks. This is also why curatorial discourse takes on particular importance in such settings. In other cases, curators invite artists to respond to a central proposition or theme; a common practice in many contemporary exhibitions and biennials. Inductive curating, by contrast, is a process of discovering the curatorial theme through close engagement with a broad range of artists and works. This was the method I adopted when curating the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival. If we consider the profound influence of early experience in theater upon Harald Szeemann, the father of independent curating, indicated by his remark that “I began to move away from ensemble work until I was doing everything by myself—a one-man style of theater that reflected my ambition to realize a Gesamtkunstwerk,³” then it becomes clear that the performing arts may, in fact, have even stronger grounds for embracing an inductive curatorial approach.

We can take this a step further by referring to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in which he writes: “Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the Universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) be given, the judgment which subsumes the particular under it… is determinant. But if only the particular be given, for which the universal has to be found, the judgment is merely reflective.⁴” Deductive reasoning, then, corresponds to what Kant calls determinant judgment: applying pre-existing abstract concepts to concrete artistic phenomena. Inductive reasoning, by contrast, draws on reflective judgment, a process of arriving at general principles by engaging deeply with specific cases.

For me, curating in the performing arts is a display of reflective judgment. Imagination plays a vital role in this process. The power of creativity lies in remaining open to each unexpected encounter, responding imaginatively to every ‘other’ that emerges, rather than relying on preconceived concepts or theoretical frameworks to determine who qualifies or fits in.

Album Production as a Curatorial Metaphor

I often like to use the process of producing a music album as a metaphor for curating in the performing arts. An album typically contains a dozen or so tracks—roughly analogous to the number of programs in an arts festival. It has a title, much like a festival is shaped by an overarching theme; it has cover art, just as a festival has its visual identity. The tracks on an album may be thematically linked or entirely independent of one another, yet this variation does not diminish the value of the album as a whole. The same can be said of curatorial practice. Of course, if the curatorial vision is particularly pronounced, the result might resemble what, in music, is considered a concept album. This is one reason I’ve long been drawn to the study of progressive rock; from Yes, Pink Floyd, and Genesis to Rush, Marillion, Dream Theater, and Steven Wilson, their work has been a continuous source of curatorial inspiration and enrichment for me.

² Bertolt Brecht, “The Attitude of the Rehearsal Director (in the Inductive Process)”, in Brecht on Theatre. Ed. by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. p. 242.

³ Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating. Geneva: JRP|Ringer, 2008. p.102

⁴ Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J.H. Bernard. London: Macmillan, 1914. p.17.

In producing an album, it’s not uncommon for the title at release to differ from its working title—or for there to be no title at all during the recording process. The same often applies to curatorial work. For instance, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon was originally titled Eclipse, and only later was the name changed to its now-iconic title. A similar fluidity can be seen in curatorial practice. In her 2011 publication Letter to A Friend, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of Documenta 13 in 2012, initially proposed an elaborate title for the exhibition: “The dance was very frenetic, active, rattling, resonating, rolling, twisting, and lasted for a long time.” (Der Tanz war sehr frenetisch, rege, rasselnd, klingend, rollend, verdreht und dauerte eine lange Zeit)⁵ However, by the time the exhibition opened, its official title had become Collapse and Recovery (Zusammenbruch und Wiederaufbau). This shift in title did not in any way diminish the impact of the exhibition: Documenta 13 was the most-visited edition in the history of the Kassel exhibition. New York curator Jens Hoffmann, in his book Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, described it as follows: “Art and the world shared the same stage, thoughtfully choreographed to provide both a provocative challenge and the rare gift of wonder.⁶ ”

Curatorial themes are not necessarily fixed; much like the title of a music album, they can evolve throughout the creative process to adapt to shifting realities. In the world of performing arts, many festivals begin planning years in advance. A concept that seemed resonant at the time may no longer speak to the world as it is by the time the festival opens, due to unforeseen events or changes in context. Conversely, curating in the performing arts—especially for large-scale urban festivals—is frequently shaped by a range of practical considerations that prevent the curation process from unfolding as freely and imaginatively as curatorial discourse. Yet these very constraints bring the curator closer to the role of a director or choreographer, where limitations often become the catalyst for possibilities and creativity. As renowned music producer Rick Rubin writes in his acclaimed book The Creative Act: A Way of Being: “Whether imposed by design or by necessity, it’s helpful to see limitation as opportunity.⁷”

Curating as A Framework for the Occurrence of Artistic Events

“There is no theatre which does or did not take place as an event.⁸” In this sense, curating in the performing arts is the act of constructing a framework that enables events to occur. Each performance or exhibition within an arts festival is an event itself. Brian McMaster, Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Festival from 1991 to 2006, once said: “A festival creates a situation where people are prepared to take a risk, and go to something that they wouldn’t otherwise think of seeing.⁹” In curating performance, one must be cautious not to overdetermine these events through excessive interpretation or theoretical framing. Doing so risks flattening the differences between them and neutralizing their nature as an event. The curator’s role, instead, is to preserve the unpredictable singularity of each occurrence, as that is what defines an event.

In July 2022, I was invited by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Tainan City Government to serve as the curator of the Tainan Arts Festival for 2023 and 2024. This invitation coincided with the city’s preparations for Tainan 400, the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Fort Zeelandia by the Dutch East India Company in 1624, which marked the beginning of Taiwan’s encounter with global maritime powers during the Age of Exploration. Because of the significance of this milestone, the scale and budget of the Tainan Arts Festival in 2023 and 2024 were considerably larger than in previous years. Although the festival is held annually, my curatorial involvement began in 2023 as a way to build momentum leading into the 2024 edition. Founded in 2012, the Tainan Arts Festival focuses on the performing arts. When I first began curating for the 400th anniversary, I didn’t begin with a fixed theme. What I did know, however, was that the festival needed strong local participation, historical research, and ideally, site-specific exhibitions or performance works that extended beyond the theater into the city itself. Curating in the performing arts often requires close negotiation with reality. The teams you hope to invite or the themes you wish to explore may fall afoul of budgetary disagreements, technical limitations of venues, scheduling conflicts.

What I saw in Tainan was a city shaped over centuries by waves of global historical forces. These transnational currents have left traces in its place names, architecture, and urban organization, giving the city’s traditions an international, hybrid character. My intention was to invite artists not only to excavate Taiwan’s layered histories and give voice to untold stories, but also to gesture toward the future. As I continued researching and initiating conversations with artists and collectives, the curatorial landscape began to gradually take shape, emerging not from a predetermined concept, but from a process of dialogue and discovery.

With such a diverse range of curatorial content, finding a theme that could both coherently express this complexity and meaningfully connect to Tainan 400 was no simple task. My instinct was to look to the city’s history for inspiration. One sleepless night, as I was growing increasingly anxious about the curatorial concept, an idea struck me: the Le Moulin Poetry Society, a Tainan-based avant-garde literary group from the 1930s that was profoundly influenced by French Surrealism. In recent years, there had been a documentary and an exhibition dedicated to their legacy. The Le Moulin poets championed Surrealism’s embrace of chance, juxtaposition, and poetic collage, an approach I found resonant with the spirit I hoped to capture. I began to wonder if the curatorial theme could pay homage to this internationally-minded artistic group from Tainan’s own past. The next day, I visited the library and found a two-volume anthology published in 2016 titled LE MOULIN: Society and Times of the Poetry Group. It included a wealth of their poetry and visual works. I picked up the volume Contemplation Ablaze and opened a page at random. There, I encountered Xiuer Lin’s (林修二) poem Sailing, and one line immediately caught my attention: “Dreaming of tomorrow’s harbor.” I had a strong intuitive response: this, I felt, could become the curatorial theme. Tainan was once a major port that played a key role in Taiwan’s maritime history. Under the Treaty of Tientsin in 1880, Anping was designated as one of the treaty ports opened for international trade. Additionally, the art events unfolding throughout the festival could embody the power of dreaming and forward movement. Both the Cultural Affairs Bureau and I agreed that the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival—scheduled from late October to early December—would be the final chapter in the Tainan 400 series of celebrations. As such, it needed to point toward the future, not merely reflect on the past. Bingo! That settled it. However, to emphasize the phrase’s active, aspirational quality and express it as something still in the making I modified it slightly, transforming it into “Harboring Dreams for the Future.” In Taiwanese Hokkien, the phrase also rolls off the tongue beautifully.

Four Modes of Participation in the Production of Publicness

⁵ Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Letter to a Friend. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2011. p.9

⁶ Jens Hoffmann, Show Time: The Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014. p. 148

⁷ Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. New York: Penguin Press, 2023. p.207

⁸ Willmar Sauter, “ Introducing the Theatrical Event” in Theatrical Event: Borders Dynamics Frame. Ed. by Vicky Ann Cremona, Peter Eversman, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. p.11

⁹ Brian Logan, “In Conversation with Rose Fenton and Sir Brian McMaster”. In Cahier de l’Atelier: Arts Festivals for the sake for art? Ghent: European Festival Association, 2008. p.104

Publicness served as a foundational idea in my curatorial approach to the Tainan Arts Festival. As an event commemorating the 400th anniversary of Taiwan’s oldest city, the festival necessarily confronted a complex landscape of histories, communities, and spaces. In this context, the pursuit of publicness is not merely an aesthetic choice but an ethical imperative. By virtue of being held in public spaces, an arts festival already entails a certain degree of publicness. But in my view, this alone is insufficient. It must also address diversity and engage with pressing issues. The public is not monolithic, it is plural. Therefore, the programming must reflect this multiplicity, both in aesthetic form and in the themes it explores. Publicness, in this sense, entails provoking dialogue, raising questions, and fostering a shared process of inquiry into the unknown. We live together in society, but cohabitation alone does not necessarily produce publicness. As Hannah Arendt once noted: “At all times people living together will have affairs that belong in the realm of public—worthy to be talked about in public. “What these matters are at any historical moment is probably utterly different. For instance, the great cathedrals were public spaces of the Middle Ages. The town hall came later. And there perhaps they had talked about a matter which is not without any interest either: the question of God. So what becomes public at any given period seems to me utterly different.¹⁰” From this perspective, the formation of publicness requires not only public space but also shared topics of concern and mechanisms of participation. I understand publicness as a concept situated between public space and the public sphere: public space emphasizes the material and spatial conditions of public participation, while the public sphere foregrounds the discursive and thematic dimensions of collective engagement. Publicness concerns the operational mechanisms through which participants are invited to act, respond, and be present.

The 2024 Tainan Arts Festival took place from October 26 to December 8, spanning six weeks under the curatorial theme Harboring Dreams for the Future. Like a bustling port full of cultural exchange and convergence, the festival presented a vibrant landscape of artistic encounters. The program included 20 performances, 3 international workshops, 4 exhibitions, 1 online documentary, 1 video installation, 1 international research residency, 2 newly published books, and 10 public lectures. The artistic formats ranged widely, from physical theater, drama, puppetry, object theater, dance, performance art, circus performance, Manzai comedy, Taiwanese opera, and street performance, to multimedia music theater, documentary theater, immersive/ambulatory theater, and youth theater. Thematically, the festival explored an equally diverse set of subjects: Taiwan’s national sovereignty, Kafka, Britney Spears, influencer culture, postcolonialism, Indigenous narratives, Taiwan’s New Drama movement, the cultural export of Taiwanese theater (to Malaysia and France), gender identity, Greek mythology, Night on the Galactic Railroad, the cultural role of independent bookstores, female factory workers in 1970s Taiwan, Vietnamese immigration, personal identity, the legacy of Taiwanese opera, Blackfoot disease, women’s agency, active aging, Taiwan’s natural ecology, and the lingering impact of war. While each project stands on its own, the festival’s content is organically interwoven. These works can be interpreted through three curatorial lenses: historical depth, transnational exchange, and intergenerational futures.

From the examples discussed above, we can see how public space and thematic concerns are developed in diversity. However, it is the mechanisms of public participation—the ways in which publicness is enacted—that require closer examination. This is where I would like to shift the focus of this essay: not to the content of publicness, but to its form. In the following section, I will analyze four types of public participation, viewed from the perspective of the audience—or the public—using two intersecting axes: bodily engagement (X-axis) and interactive expression (Y-axis).

A: Publicness as Active Engagement

In this mode of public participation, the audience demonstrates a high degree of bodily agency—free to move through space and engage directly and intensively with the artists and artworks, sometimes even becoming part of the work itself. Relational aesthetics can be seen as a representative example of this mechanism, and similar dynamics often unfold in workshops. In such public spaces, both creators and audiences actively intervene in the shaping of the topics or works theywish to discuss. At the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival, one example of this was German choreographer Sabine Zahn’s Dwelling Perspectives_Tainan, a project in which she invited audiences to join her in walking through the city, sharing perceptions of Tainan’s urban landscape. The project culminated in a public video presentation of the project’s findings and an open dialogue session, turning the audience into co-investigators and co-authors of the work. An even more radical example was On the Top of the Dragon’s Back – Southern Curatography. Art Event by the Tainan Community College. As citizens of Tainan, they took on the roles of researchers and curators, ultimately organizing an exhibition that presented alternative perspectives on Tainan 400. In doing so, they subverted the traditionally passive role of the public in festival contexts, reclaiming curatorial agency. Another compelling case was Asobi: Absence Space Nomadic Project by Absence Space, an experimental art space in Tainan founded by artists Yu-Ching Chen and Yi-Lin Ku. Functioning as a space for communities, residency, research, and experimental performance, it has also become a gathering point for Taiwanese artists from the south of Taiwan, including so called ‘Northern drifters’ who have returned to Tainan. Asobi was created in collaboration with Malaysian artist Zhi-Xien Ng, who constructed a portable inflatable installation made from blue and white tarpaulin—a 1:1 replica of Absence Space’s third-floor theater. During the festival, they brought this mobile art space into several public spaces in Tainan—Tainan Park, Nanmen Park, and Shueipingwun Park—hosting film screenings, performance art, reading groups, and concerts.

They explained that Asobi (遊び, あそび), a Japanese term, translates as “play” or “recreation”—referring to activities of leisure and game playing. Interestingly, in engineering, asobi also means “play” in the sense of “tolerance” or “gap”, the built-in space between mechanical parts that allows them to function smoothly without wearing each other down.

When asked about the public significance of the Asobi project, Yi-Lin Ku responded: “The idea of publicness in this project operates on two levels. Internally, within the network of Absence Space, the Tainan Arts Festival offered us an opportunity to open up and extend the performative space outward—to allow each nomadic station to take on a different character. In doing so, we created points with a lower barrier to entry for participants, enabling them to engage with the festival on their own terms. Externally, all the nomadic sites we selected were public parks in Tainan, marking our first direct interaction with public space. To passersby, the work may have been difficult to understand at first glance. But at the very least, it sparked curiosity, serving as a starting point for a dialogue with the city. Our hope is that these nomadic actions will continue. One day, when people see that inflatable tent, they’ll recognize it as a sign that Absence Space is once again stirring up something in Tainan.”

I followed up by asking: what happens if the mechanism of publicness fails—how can it be repaired? Yu-Ching Chen responded: “What counts as a moment of failure? Perhaps even defining what failure means is itself an intriguing question. At Tainan Park, I was sitting under a tree talking with my sister, who is an architect. She could sense that I was trying to create a space where things could happen. But from her perspective—as both an architect and an ordinary visitor—when she saw a group of people doing strange things in the woods, without any form of clear invitation or orientation, she felt hesitant to approach. She told me that, in her architectural training, they were taught that a so-called ‘multi-functional space’ is, in practice, often a non-functional one. But for me, this kind of ‘non-functional’ or ambiguous space is precisely where imagination can be born. Still, she had a point. In a public space, what kind of publicness is present when the space created is deliberately obscure or concealed?” At Shueipingwun Park, an elderly man saw our inflatable tent and asked if we were performing some kind of religious ritual. He was curious why art would intentionally make a space feel hidden or mysterious. After all, we had taken a conspicuous area of the park and enclosed it—marking it with a kind of boundary. We imagined it as a space of transformation: a zone where viewers are transformed into a multitude, awakening the potential for collective action.

B: Publicness as a Forum for Collective Discourse

The open expression of opinion is a fundamental dimension of publicness, and the most common format for this is the forum. At the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival, a wide range of talks and lectures were held—not merely to promote festival programming, but as integral public forums in their own right. The most compelling example was the lecture Queere, feministische und migrantische Perspektiven (Queer, Feminist, and Migrant Perspectives) given by Louna Sbou, director of Oyoun, a Berlin-based cultural center. As a queer Muslim, Sbou shared how Oyoun came under political pressure and had its funding withdrawn by the Berlin city government after taking a stance on the 2023 Israel–Palestine conflict that diverged from the mainstream. The case drew international attention, including a dedicated article in The Guardian. Beyond formal lectures, one particularly notable experiment in forum-making came from Limited Recognition, a performance by The Fantasy Theatre. The production reimagined the theater itself as an alternative site for public dialogue. In traditional theatrical settings, audiences are often passive observers, unable to engage in meaningful exchange. Limited Recognition challenged this norm by incorporating digital technology to enable real-time, participatory debate. The piece was based on the lives of three historical figures from 1920 to 1950, each with different political trajectories: Yeh Sheng-Chi, a Tainan native persecuted during Taiwan’s White Terror; Yang Wei-Li, a victim of China’s Cultural Revolution; and former president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Lee Teng-Hui. Their biographies were restructured into a series of dramatic vignettes and survey questions posed to the audience. During the performance, audience members voted via their phones, and the results were immediately projected onstage to guide live discussion. These votes directly influenced the direction of the narrative, making the performance an open process. The boundary between stage and audience dissolved into an intense, real-time exchange. National identity has long been a site of tension within Taiwanese society, and it has become increasingly difficult to engage in open dialogue about such politically charged topics in everyday life. Much like comment sections on the internet, public discourse often defaults to entrenched positions, leaving little room for genuine exchange; but within the fictional frame of this theatrical experience, and through processes of anonymity and play, audience members were able to express opinions, reflecting on and inhabiting voices other than their own, creating a unique mode of public discourse.

I asked the director of Limited Recognition Liao Jun-Kai, “What does publicness mean to you in the context of this work?” He replied: “Your question reminds me of this year’s World Baseball Premier 12 final, when Chen Chieh-Hsien hit a three-run homer. As he rounded the bases, he gestured to his chest with the sign for ‘Team Taiwan’—even though the front of his jersey was completely blank, without any text. It made me think: what is the shared image we carry on our chests, or in our hearts? What does it look like? It does not have to be spoken aloud. Limited Recognition poses a similar kind of fill-in-the-blank question to Taiwanese audiences in Tainan. Like that blank jersey, it asks: ‘You are _____.’ At first glance, it might seem like an overly simple prompt in today’s global context. But what I’m really trying to explore—what I’m really asking—is: how do we arrive at the answers we write in that blank space? Are they as self-evident as they appear? If they were, then the jersey wouldn’t have to remain blank because of the Lausanne Agreement. So I try to pull contemporary audiences back into the period between the 1920s and 1950s and ask the same question again. During the final years of Japanese rule, the end of World War II, and the early postwar period, the identity of ‘Taiwanese’ existed in a kind of ambiguous, unspoken in-betweenness—where the blank space between heart and speech could be filled with many, even conflicting, answers. We have come through darkness and spent generations feeling our way through that blank space in search of a shared name. Limited Recognition simply hopes to remind future generations of the path Taiwan has taken. to find—through our hands, our chests, and our hearts—the name that belongs to us.

“What, then, do you see as the relationship between publicness and politicization in art?” I asked. Jun-Kai responded: “In ancient Greece, the theater flourished alongside the development of Athenian democracy. The theater was a space where citizens gathered to engage in public discourse and political negotiation. In my view, theater, public issues, and politics form an ambiguous trinity that is intertwined and inseparable. The role of artistic practice, then, is to hold open a space, both temporal and spatial for pluralistic and ambiguous dialogue to unfold within the realities of the public and the political.”

C: Publicness as a Form of Free Assembly

This form of publicness—understood as free assembly—can take two distinct shapes. The first involves performances staged in open public spaces, where large audiences naturally gather. While these spectators may appear to be passive observers, their very act of assembly mirrors that of any democratic gathering, expressing a collective interest in shared public concerns. In 1970s, Jean-Luc Penso, founder of the puppet troupe Le Théâtre du Petit Miroir, traveled to Taiwan to study traditional glove puppetry. Upon returning to France in the 1980s, he began performing Taiwanese glove puppetry professionally. His troupe has since toured in more than 80 countries, often with the support of the Association Française d’Action Artistique (under the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, France), representing France in cultural exchanges around the world. Glove puppetry is a vital part of Taiwan’s traditional cultural heritage, and Le Théâtre du Petit Miroir stands as a unique example of Taiwanese culture being transmitted internationally. For the Tainan Arts Festival, we invited the troupe to perform The Odyssey in front of a local temple square—a meaningful site for both performance and gathering. The event attracted a large audience, many of whom came out of curiosity for this moment of cross-cultural exchange.

Another mode of free assembly, characterized by a high degree of bodily agency but lower interactivity, is the act of wandering and viewing most often associated with visual art exhibitions. Although the Tainan Arts Festival has traditionally focused on the performing arts, for the 2024 edition we invited several artists to present visual installations and exhibitions as part of the program. These exhibitions were held in two main venues, one of which was the newly renovated 321 Art Alley Settlement —a site composed of Japanese-era buildings from the colonial period, now transformed into an arts and cultural hub. Among the exhibitions held there were the Tainan Community College’s aforementioned curatorial project mentioned earlier, Ming Bai Experimental Lab’sThe Mystery of Blackfoot Disease III – A Footage of Troubled Waters, On My Way Home, based on research into Blackfoot disease; and Hul Kanha and Shen Phebea ‘s Perspective on Women’s Lives and Values, a collaborative project between Cambodian and Taiwanese artists. Visitors were free to move through the exhibitions at their own pace, to pause, reflect, and contemplate, or simply observe. Yet they remained part of a shared spatial experience with others who were likewise engaged in this form of public assembly.

Another exhibition venue for the Tainan Arts Festival was Tainan Wu Garden, a beautifully preserved Baroque Revival-style building that is also a designated municipal heritage site. We invited French artist Stefan Libiot, who has been based in southern Taiwan since 2019, to curate an exhibition there titled I ❤ TN. Stefan previously worked as an assistant director on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue and Three Colors: White, and his photographic work is known for capturing the surreal and poetic moments that emerge from everyday life. Since relocating to Taiwan, he has continued producing films, with six completed works to date. For this exhibition, he curated the space through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, displaying his own moving images alongside other works. One panel in the exhibition reads: “The five signs that are arranged at the five different installations of the space correspond to the five discourses theorized by Jacques Lacan and which are central in the development of his psychoanalysis. The discourse of the analyst, of the master, of the hysteric, of the academic, the capitalist discourse …Their exhibition here invites you to experience their simple presence and to see if they influence our conversations.” Yet the exhibition was not static. It also functioned as a live video-based performance: throughout the festival, Stefan continued filming and editing on-site, incorporating footage of visitors into the evolving installation. In this way, the audience became part of the work itself.

When asked about the publicness of I ❤ TN, he said: “A lot of people say they don’t understand. We sometimes have the opportunity to talk about that. Since I had given myself Marcel Duchamp’s phrase as a pretext: ‘the audience lives a few moments in an unknown and irrational image as a way of going against logical reality.’ My idea was to intervene as little as possible but to come and discuss when I felt that something was possible …Indeed, more and more I filmed without asking people’s permission beforehand. Because the place became a film location that was being shot, and people became actors. No one refused. Was it an exhibition? A cabaret? A theater? A church? A people’s assembly? Was it just a place to have your own fantasies? At the end someone told me we had 4208 visitors. I immediately thought of 4208 different fantasies.”

D: Publicness as Independent Thinking

¹⁰ Hannah Arendt, The Recovery of the Public World. Ed. by Melvyn A. Hill. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. p.318

The final mode of publicness arises when both bodily engagement and interactivity are minimal—a situation that is, in fact, quite common, particularly in traditional theatrical settings, where audiences are typically expected to sit quietly and refrain from intervening in the performance. Yet mere physical presence in a shared theatrical space is not enough to constitute publicness. For it to be activated, the work must pose questions to the audience. Even when there is no direct interaction between audience and performers, and no visible formation of a collective audience in the moment, that does not mean independent thinking is absent. On the contrary, it is within the silent, interior process of reflection and debate that the potential for a theatrical public sphere emerges. This depends, above all, on the audience’s capacity for independent thinking. The words theatre and theory share the same Greek root—thea—which means “to see from a distance.” At its core, this implies a capacity for critical observation. As analyzed in The Theatrical Public Sphere, for theatre to constitute a public sphere, it must generate debate around public concerns on stage. Even the materials that surround the performance—program notes, flyers, online publicity—are crucial means for extending the conversation. As the book argues, “Theatres communicate with their public both before and after and not just during performances: they inform, entice and provide them with informational as well aesthetic stimuli with the ultimate aim of attracting individual spectators who will form a collective audience.”

I prefer not to overexplain the theatrical programming itself. After all, it is the curator’s responsibility to ensure that the works engage with pressing social issues or introduce new questions—and as previously mentioned, the range of themes explored in the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival offers a glimpse into that commitment. What I would rather explore here are formats beyond the theater that can still provoke independent thought among audiences: specifically, online video and book publishing. For this edition of the festival, we invited Malaysian scholar Shen Guo-Min (沈國民) to produce a short documentary, approximately 30 minutes in length, titled Footnotes Offstage: Piecing Together Pre-War Theatrical Exchanges between Taiwan and Malaysia. (台下行跡——尋找二戰前台馬戲劇交流的拼圖) The film is based on research into Taiwanese theater troupes that toured Malaysia before the outbreak of World War II. The Tainan Arts Festival collaborated with Announcer, a newly launched performing arts platform, to make the documentary freely available to viewers via its website. The film sparked considerable interest in Malaysia’s media landscape, prompting at least eight articles across various newspapers.

One of the distinctive aspects of the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival was its commitment to publishing, something rarely undertaken by most arts festivals in Taiwan—Tainan has a long-standing tradition of youth theater, but it has primarily focused on youth as performers, rather than on creating theater for young audiences. The latter, however, has a well-established history and institutional infrastructure in Germany. With the support of the Goethe-Institut, we invited two scholars, Prof. Dr. Gerd Taube from Frankfurt University and Prof. Christoph Lepschy from the University of Salzburg, to co-edit a volume specifically for Taiwanese readers: Shaping the Future: Contemporary Theatre for Young Audiences in Germany (Zukunft mitgestalten: Zeitgenössisches Theater für junges Publikum in Deutschland). Taiwan’s theatre publishing market is relatively small, which means that when a festival allocates resources to support translated publications, it can directly respond to current needs within the professional arts community, especially by introducing contemporary thought that would otherwise remain inaccessible due to language barriers. Given the growing interest in dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturge in Taiwan, we also translated Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice (2023), authored by Prof. Maaike Bleeker of Utrecht University. Both publishing and digital media engage individual audiences, many of whom may be spatially and temporally removed from the live events of the festival. These formats allow us to reach new and often unknown publics, expanding the scope and potential of publicness beyond the immediate site of performance.

Tai-Jung Yu, the translator of Doing Dramaturgy into Chinese and president of the Taiwan chapter of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC), shared his thoughts on the publicness of festival publishing. He remarked: “Compared to visual arts festivals, performing arts festivals are more ephemeral. This is not only due to differences in medium—which make preservation and archiving more difficult for performance—but also because a performing arts festival is essentially composed of a series of live, site-specific events. Publishing, by contrast, is a mode of production that transcends the limitations of the live moment, enabling the public circulation of knowledge. When a festival commits to publishing, it creates an encounter between knowledge and the event. The publicness of theatre is generated through gathering, watching, and discussion. By documenting, translating, and contextualizing this ephemeral experience, publishing allows the specific kind of publicness that emerges from performance to reach beyond its original temporal frame. It also opens up new discursive dimensions of the festival itself.”

I then asked, “What makes the book as a medium distinct from the digital, such that it becomes meaningful for an arts festival?” Tai-Jung Yu responded: “The very act of flipping through a book offers a bodily experience completely different from swiping a screen or clicking on links, and this difference shapes our relationship to knowledge. For example, reading a printed book naturally invites and enables, nonlinear navigation—moving back and forth as needed. Compared to digital reading, this allows for a more integrated and holistic grasp of the material. Theatre is a space that simultaneously engages the senses and the intellect, and it often demands our full physical and mental presence. I feel that reading a printed book asks the same of me. At the very least, it’s a noticeably different experience from searching for information through a screen. Both theater and the book require a kind of sustained engagement—a commitment to reading or watching through to a certain depth or length. In an age of increasing fragmentation and accelerated digital fatigue, an arts festival remains one of the few spaces where immersive, embodied experiences of this kind can still take place. In my view, the increasingly rare production of printed knowledge should and must be recognized as an essential part of this cultural ecosystem.”

Conclusion

This paper has focused on the ways in which publicness was explored and shaped through the 2024 Tainan Arts Festival. While publicness was taken into account from the very beginning of the curatorial process, it was not the central thematic focus. Most of the works presented in the festival were newly commissioned premieres, and their final form could not be fully anticipated in advance. It was the performances and exhibitions themselves that gave rise to distinct modes of public engagement, which only become more legible upon reflection, after the festival had concluded. In revisiting these events, I found myself deeply inspired by the diversity of forms that emerged. The four participatory mechanisms proposed in this paper serve as an analytical framework, not a definitive typology. They are intended to assess whether the aesthetic forms of publicness enacted across curatorial practices are sufficiently diverse.

All of this, I believe, is made possible by an inductive approach to curating. I do not begin with a predetermined concept or fixed objective. Instead, I allow such ideas to operate subconsciously, remaining open to the imaginaries sparked by different artists and projects. Unexpected outcomes, in time, reveal themselves. It is only now, in this very moment of reflection, that I realize the four participatory mechanisms outlined in this paper may themselves suggest a new definition of publicness: one that arises from free assembly grounded in active engagement; that stimulates independent thinking through the format of a public forum; and that, in doing so, transforms publicness into the public sphere itself.

¹¹ Christoph B. Balme, Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. p47