Residency: Chen Wu-kang and Sun Ruey-horng

Artist-In-Residence Workshop
March 4-22, 2024

CNP welcomes dancer Chen Wu-kang and videographer Sun Ruey-horng to develop a new work entitled Closed Tomorrow at CalArts.

The collaborative duo of celebrated Taiwanese dance phenomenon Chen Wu-kang and Lucille Lortel award-winning performance maker Sun Ruey-horng conjure the ongoing neurological impacts of pandemic on our expressions of liveness—the body, its aura and its spiritual core. In a technology-driven collaboration that charts new dimensions in live dance and video performance, Closed Tomorrow makes legible the dancers’ real-time adaptations to a rapidly changing, heavily mediated performance space. At the same time, fast-fire live-editing allows bodies to break through the limits of physiology, invoking new possibilities for our emergent world.

About the Artists

Chen Wu-kang was born and raised in Taiwan. He began studying dance at the age of twelve and graduated from the Taiwan University of Arts. In 2001, Wu-kang danced with Ballet Tech and Peridance and became the soloist. He started his long-term collaboration with choreographer Eliot Feld. He was also the guest dancer in Diamond Project of New York City Ballet in 2006. In 2004, he co-founded HORSE as an artistic director. Significant works include Velocity (2007), Bones (2008), and 2 Men (2012), which toured in Asia, the US, and Europe.

Wu-kang has also collaborated with artists in different fields, including Exhibition X Performance Successor (2011), and the curatorial project Dance X Sounds seasonal improvisation platform Primal Chaos. In 2016, he began an intercultural dance dialogue with Thai master Pichet Klunchun, Behalf, which premiered in 2018 and toured in 2019.

Meanwhile, Wu-kang also worked on the three-year project Choreographing Story. He directed The show must go on by Jérôme Bel at the Taipei Art Festival in 2019, and co-created as well as performed Dances for Wu-Kang Chen (2020), receiving the 2021 Taishin Performing Arts Award. Recent online streaming works Thank You So Much for Your Time (2019), Thank You For Staying Home (2020), and 14 (2021 Da:ns Festival, Esplanade, Singapore). Learn more.

Sun Ruey-horng is a video designer who is known for creating large-scale performative multimedia environments which interact with human perception, memories and uncanny experiences in our daily lives. He received the 2020 Lucille Lortel award for his projection design in The Headlands, produced by Lincoln Center Theater. His design works have been presented on Broadway, the Guggenheim Museum, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, La MaMa, LCT3, and National Theater Taipei, among others. Learn more.