LONDON.- In March 2025, Tate Modern will stage the world premiere of Hagay Dreaming, a new performance by Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn. Based on an old legend belonging to the Truku tribe of Taiwan, Hagay Dreaming combines ancient ways of performing tribal culture with cutting-edge technologies, blurring the boundaries between tradition and futurism. Three performances will be held in The Tanks at Tate Modern between 13-15 March, bringing this raw industrial space to life with lasers, dance, instrumentals, ritual and chant. The programme is presented in collaboration with the international festival Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, taking place across London from 12 March to 8 April 2025.
Hagay Dreaming is a collaboration between Taiwanese American new media artist Shu Lea Cheang and Taiwanese artist and practicing shaman of the Truku Indigenous people Dondon Hounwn. An ancient legend of the Truku tribe is recounted across six acts, following a hunter who falls asleep inside a hollow tree while sheltering from a downpour. In her dreams, she meets a group of spiritual non-binary beings called ‘Hagay’, who pass on valuable ancestral knowledge of living, weaving and hunting. The piece presents an artistic vision for the future based on the Truku people’s principle of living known as ‘Gaya’, which perceives all living beings as connected, merging body and soul to achieve a state of ‘snhiyi’, a power of total trust.
Connecting Cheang’s new media practice spanning installation, film and performance with Hounwn’s inheritance of indigenous dance and rituals, Hagay Dreaming blends traditional ways of performing tribal culture with electronic and digital technology. First initiated in 2020 with producer Ping Yi Chen, the project has since been presented in several formats, with Tate Modern staging the first full-length theatrical production. Performers will move through horizontal and vertical laser beams referencing weaving, rain and hunting, accompanied by a soundtrack fusing contemporary classical music with ancient indigenous rhythms.
Ahead of the three performances, Cheang and Hounwn joined by producer Ping Yi Chen will give an artist talk in the Starr Cinema at Tate Modern on 12 March, providing insight into their unique collaboration, delving deeper into the Gaya principle of living, and discussing Hounwn’s role in contributing to the survival and transfer of indigenous knowledge to a new generation. On 16 March, key dancers, Temu Masin and Sinkuy Katadrepan, joined by Dondon Hounwn and choreographer Dahu, will lead a dance workshop inspired by the Exchange act from Hagay Dreaming.
The performances of Hagay Dreaming form part of Tate’s wider commitment to exhibiting, collecting and researching performance and participatory artworks. On 6 February 2025, Tate Modern will stage a special live performance by Samia Halaby – whose work features in the exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet – and the Kinetic Painting Group. Halaby is an early innovator of digital art known for her ‘kinetic abstract paintings,’ which she first made in the late 1980s by coding on her Amiga computer. Later developing a program to create these paintings live, Halaby has improvised alongside several musicians and this event presents a unique opportunity to see her perform alongside the two original Kinetic Painting Group musicians, Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Hasan Bakr.
In Tate Modern’s collection displays, Meshac Gaba’s Art and Religion, a room consisting of wooden shelves filled with religious and spiritual objects and arranged in a cross formation, will host tarot readings on the second Saturday of the month between January and April 2025. Elsewhere in the gallery, Abbas Zahedi will activate his sonic installation Begin Again, on display as part of the exhibition Gathering Ground from 29 January to 31 December 2025, with a monthly support group. Held in collaboration with a series of guest thinkers, musicians and artists, these open sessions will explore the psychological impact of ecological breakdown and reframe ecological grief as a tool for connection and resistance. The inaugural Infinities Commission will launch on 22 April 2025, which will see selected artist Christelle Oyiri create a visionary new work for The Tanks.
Shu Lea Cheang (b.1954) is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre-bending, gender-hacking art practices. Celebrated as a net art pioneer with Brandon (1998-1999), the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cheang represented Taiwan with the mixed media installation, 3x3x6, at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Crafting her own genre of Sci-Fi New Queer Cinema, she has made four feature films: Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2024, she received the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. In 2025, she will have a survey show at Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Truku artist Dondon Hounwn (b. 1985) was born in the Dowmung tribe in Xiulin Township, Hualien County, Taiwan. Hounwn’s work cuts across media, generational and cultural lines, blending ancestral knowledge with avant-garde, cross-gender aesthetics. An inheritor of tribal ballads, instruments and rituals, he works in performance, installation, video and environmental theatre. In 2015, Dondon Hounwn founded Elug Art Corner where indigenous youths research Truku cultural heritage. Since 2023, Dondon Hounwn holds the annual GAYA Cosmos gathering with artists and researchers in exploring Gaya living principles.
