Shu Lea Cheang, Dondon Hounwn

Hagay Dreaming

13 March 2025 — 15 March 2025

Tate Modern, London

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.

Hagay Dreaming is presented by Tate & Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. This project is curated by Rosalie Doubal, Senior Curator, International Art, Performance & Participation and Dina Akhmadeeva, Assistant Curator, International Art, and produced by Demelza Watts, Production Manager, Performance and Participation.

Artistic direction of Hagay Dreaming is led by Dondon Hounwn, working with solo vocalist Shan Shan Chen; choreographer Dahu and three Elug Art Corner trained dancers and performers: Pilaw Uraw, Dremedreman, Ljaculjingiljing and Kiyu Pahauran. Cheang collaborates with a group of exquisite Taiwanese artists in presenting her first formal theatrical production: stage designer Hsien Yu Cheng; laser artist aka_chang; costume designer Shao Yen Chen; and music producer Sayun Chang.

Shu Lea Cheang

Shu Lea Cheang (born in Taiwan, 1954) is an artist and networker working at the interface between video, net-based installation, software interaction and durational performance. For over four decades, her practice explores subjects that are in a state of constant flux, including racial relations, the ecological impact of humans, information dissemination, the ethics of biotechnology and sexual politics.

Her first landmark exhibition, Color Schemes, was held in 1990 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Guggenheim web-based commission, Brandon, 1998-1999, is the first work of this medium commissioned by a major institution and is continually cited in new media art history as a seminal work of net art. Brandon is a probing investigation of human sexuality and identity through the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man, who was raped and murdered in Nebraska for being transgender. She has had foresight into alternative currencies and decentralised organisations with Garlic=Rich Air (2002–), investigated gamified societies with Bowling Alley (1995), probed biotechnologies in Locker Baby Project (2001–2012) and explored their mutable nature in Mycelium Network Society (2017–).

Cheang represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale, presenting 3x3x6, 2019, a panoptic installation dealing with architectural control, confinement technologies and data collection via ‘case studies’ of people imprisoned because of their gender, sexual or racial nonconformity.

In 2024, Project Native Informant presented Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023, a solo exhibition of Cheang’s four major film works: FRESH KILL, 1994, I.K.U., 2000, FLUIDØ, 2017, and UKI, 2023. Each work dismisses disciplinary limitations, conventional separations of form and content, aesthetics and truth. Her genre bending gender hacking practices challenge existing operating mechanisms and society’s structural boundaries.

Cheang’s works have been exhibited internationally, including; MUSEION, Bolzano; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; NTT Inter Communication Center, Tokyo and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has been a member of the alternative media collective Paper Tiger Television since 1982 and produced public-access programs for the group addressing racism in the media.

She was recently awarded the 2024 LG Guggenheim Award in recognition of her prescient exploration of emerging technologies and their broader societal implications.

In 2025, Tate Modern will host the UK premiere of Hagay Dreaming. This acclaimed performance by Cheang and practicing shaman Dondon Hounwn combines dance and ritual with laser projections and motion-capture technology.

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