In her article titled From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator[1], American performance scholar Bertie Ferdman features a "curated" incident that occurred during the Edinburgh Festival’s The Theatre of the Future forum in 1963 as an introduction. Without any prior notice, the work Play of Happening, directed and organized by theater maker Ken Dewey, comprised a series of happenings such as a chandelier adorned with sheep bones hanging from the ceiling, a naked woman pushed into the space, unexpected, tapped voices. The happenings catalyzed a sense of discomfort and disruption among audience members.

As a response invited by the forum’s organiser to the discussions at the forum, this

"unconventional" theater performance demonstrated Dewey’s critical reflection on the structure of "traditional" theater-making and audience engagement. By deconstructing how normative a theater play was made and integrating the notion of "happening" coined by Allan Kaprow in the context of visual art, Dewey’s intervention, as interpreted by Ferdman, elucidates the contemporary role of curators, about the creation of meaning through the mediation of works within specific contexts—addressing the how, why, and for whom a work is framed and received. Following this case, Ferdman then contextualises a trajectory of curating performance while situating "performance" within the interstices of visual and performing arts.

Ferdman’s contextualization of approaching performance curation and the work of a performance curator reminds me of what (performance-based) artists have often proposed and enacted. They engage in critical inquiry and challenge the status quo by addressing what has yet to occur, disrupting established settings, and orchestrating a collective assembly of individuals and live actions within specific temporal and spatial contexts.

In many places in East Asia, the conceptualization of performance curation and the role of curators within academic and artistic institutions has predominantly been influenced by Western-centric translations and cultural exchanges from the 1990s.

It wasn’t until the 2010s that museums, theaters and festivals began to adopt the term "curating performance" and embed the position of "performance curator".[2] Meanwhile, the historical background and evolution of the arts sector in this region diverge from the Eurocentric frameworks. In many instances, the modern cultural infrastructure of policies, arts education, cultural institutions, and funding systems has been young or still doesn’t exist nowadays. With a lack of institutional invitations for artists to engage in artistic or curatorial innovation, very often, in terms of "curating", artists just "do" and do it together. Artists DIY(ed) festivals, initiatives, gatherings and projects to create their own cultural spaces outside institutional realms.

This writing brings together three artist-curated cases from the postwar period, namely Wang Molin’s project October (or Shiyue in Chinese Mandarin) in Taiwan in 1987, Mit Jai Inn and his collaborators’ Chiang Mai Social Installation in Thailand from 1992 to 1998 and the early practices of the Gutai, founded by Jiro Yoshihara in the late 1950s. Through the cases, I’d examine how they have cultivated a potential understanding of performance curation and the role of curators (and its history), (re-) positioning that the concept of curating is characterized as an artistic practice, emerging from the specific cultural contexts of this region, rather than being solely a product of the empowerment by art institutions. This perspective highlights the potential for cultural agency and community engagement inherent and embodied in artists' practices.

October

In 1987, During Taiwan’s political transition towards democracy and the early stage of martial law’s end, the National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center (now the National Theater and Concert Hall) was inaugurated in Taipei. Its opening performance was Goujian's Restoration of the Nation shown on the 25th of October—the date celebrated as the Republic of China’s "Retrocession Day". This programme conveyed an ideology rooted in nationalism and patriotism as Chiang Kai-shek lost in the civil war with Mao Zedong’s People's Republic of China and retreated the "Nation" to the island of Taiwan in 1949 following Japan's colonial rule. Clearly, the establishment of the National Theatre in Taipei served as an agenda for political propaganda.

On the same day of the National Theatre’s opening, activist, theater critic and maker Wang Molin convened a gathering of emerging theater and performance artists, including troupes Rive-Gauche Theatre, Ruin Circle Theatre, and Notebook Theatre[3], to stage October over two consecutive days at an abandoned site along the coast of Sanzhi, a suburb remoted from the capital.[4] The performance took place in a dilapidated house located at the intersection of land and sea, characterized by its unkempt and open-air environment with muddy terrain. performers, dancers, writers and video artists from the three collectives collaboratively deployed a series of actions and plays. Notably, Li Huanghsiung, the director of Rive-Gauche Theatre, crafted a play[5] that interwove selected passages from Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch with excerpts from short novels authored by former Red Guards during Mao's Cultural Revolution, among other texts. The intentions and thematic statements of this performance were distinctly articulated.

Wang retrospected this event in 2018 and stated that Taiwan’s post-war period from the 1950s to the 1980s was shaped by a Cold War-era, anti-communist, and martial-law surveillance regime. Through October, the artists endeavoured to investigate questions of self-identity, including how their cohort, aged twenty to forty, were impacted by historical and cultural dynamics, and how they were related to concepts such as statehood, martial law, democracy, and political asymmetries between the left and right ideologies.[6]

From the late 1980s, particularly following the end of martial law, numerous practitioners in the cultural and artistic sectors—including visual arts, theater, and literature—intensified their advocacy for freedom of speech in opposition to the dictatorship. This advocacy was frequently manifested through performances conducted in public spaces and on the streets. Within this context, October emerged as a curated collective initiative that united members of the theater community and others. Wang played a pivotal role in assembling artists to collaboratively curate this event, which involved determining the structure of each work, including live performances and installations, developing movements and scores, and situating the challenges faced in theater-making. This initiative also sought to resist the dominant ideology of political correctness as endorsed by national arts institutions. For the first time, this event saw theater groups in collaboration in the history of Taiwan’s burgeoning experimental theater movement emerging in that era.

Chiang Mai Social Installation

In late 1992, following the violent suppression of the Black May protests in Thailand, artists Mit Jai Inn and Uthit Atimana initiated, with Navin Rawanchaikul and a group of artists and activists, launched the Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992-1998)[7]. Akin to October, which aimed to make things happen in alternative settings, this six-year project, as a 4-edition DIY artist-run independent festival, consisted of exhibitions, performance actions, and public speeches and discussions staged in everyday locations such as cemeteries, temples, public squares, private flats, and canals.

As articulated by Simon Soon, "The genesis of CMSI is intimately connected to Thailand’s modern art history and the institutional challenges that it faced by the early 1990s"[8]. Historically, the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci (later known as Silpa Bhirasri) established Thailand’s Silpakorn University in the 1940s under and with the support of the monarchy, introducing Western art techniques into public education and founding modern Thai art. By the 1960s, Bangkok had emerged as an artistic power center, with elite collectors establishing private galleries, further cementing the influence of institutional art ecosystems. In contrast, the young artist community in Chiang Mai, a relatively peripheral region, utilized the CMSI to create avenues for artistic expression and discourse through grassroots "art festival movement". Gridthiya Gaweewong has noted that CMSI exemplified a departure from the traditional model in which the arts serve national ideologies, advocating for autonomy and emancipation.[9]

Mit recounted that returning from the University of Applied Arts Vienna to his hometown of Chiang Mai, he was eager to collaborate with fellow artists in a manner reminiscent of a sangha (พระสงฆ์), a Buddhist term translated into English as "a social entity" or "community"[10]. His objective was to integrate the sense of artistic "freedom" he had encountered in Europe, which included the practice of exhibiting artworks in non-gallery environments, into a dialogue with the local realities of Thailand. In pursuit of artist-to-artist collaboration, Mit and his colleagues at Chiang Mai Social Installation sought to facilitate organic programming that eschewed fixed agendas, author-centric projects, and censorship.[11]

Through the series of festivals, artists took over public and private spaces to showcase artworks such as paintings, sculptures and installations, creating alternative exhibitions and soon attracting many international artists to participate.

While the format of the festival had garnered well-received, notably, Mit and Uthit further challenged the festival itself to fringe out gatherings by initiating another project, Week of Cooperative Suffering, an engaging and durational night-walk performance.

The inaugural week, which took place in 1995 strategically between festival editions, immersed festivalgoers in the social and communal contexts of Chiang Mai. Participants traversed various locations throughout the city, including riversides, red-light districts, migrant-worker neighbourhoods, slums, and abattoirs, gaining insights into the city's urban and economic formulation. This initiative facilitated the festival's community-engaged practice, breaking free from the artists' echo chamber and fostering connections with a more diverse and broader segment of the everyday populace.

The practice of Chiang Mai Social Installation demonstrated a collective effort among artists to cultivate their community and celebrate their work through the device of an art festival. In the 1990s and beyond, a period marked by the emergence and proliferation of numerous arts biennales—including the Gwangju Biennale in 1995, the Shanghai Biennale in 1996, the Taipei Biennial in 1998, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 1999—this temporary collective represented a significant model of artist-led curation during a time when contemporary art in the region had yet to become institutionalized.


The early works of Gutai

The early activities of the Gutai Art Association in Western Japan during the late 1950s, led by Jiro Yoshihara, also exemplified collective-curatorial practices exploring alternative spaces for artistic expression. Founded in Ashiya, a city situated between Osaka and Kobe, the group staged experimental exhibitions with performance-based and participatory actions in 1955–1957, oscillating between Ashiya and Tokyo. At the time when Eastern-Japan Tokyo took the epicentre of the art scene and modernist art predominated in Japan's post-war artistic landscape, Yoshihara encouraged a group of young artists to challenge the idea of "newness" and "originality," urging artists to create "art that no one has ever made before"[12].

In pursuit of new aesthetic languages of their own, this call for transformation precipitated significant performative works such as Atsuko Tanaka’s presentation of wearing an electric dress in an exhibition opening (Electric Dress, in the 2nd Gutai Exhibition, 1956), Saburo Murakami’s act of running through framed papers (Passing Through, in the 2nd Gutai Exhibition, 1956), Kazuo Shiraga's foot-painted artworks, Sadamasa Motonaga’s production of smoke on stage (in Gutai Exhibition on the Stage, 1957), and Shozo Shimamoto’s action of throwing paint-filled bottles to create paintings ( in the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, 1956). Through these interventions, the artists challenged the established boundaries of exhibition-making, embodying ephemerality and collective engagement within their artistic practices.  By foregrounding the performative processes in these action-based works, Gutai effectively blurred the academic distinctions between visual and performing arts; the artist's corporeal presence became a means to "curate" and interconnect objects, bodies, time, and space.

Through The Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun in Ashiya Park in 1955,[13] and the Gutai Art Exhibition on the Stage at Osaka’s Sankei Kaikan Hall in 1957, the group experimented with spatial conditions of "processing" and "performing" art, particularly in the latter case by Motonaga’s work expelling and filling the venue with smoke, introducing a pioneering concept of theater-exhibition.

In the interim, Gutai engaged in self-curation and organization of exhibitions and publications to cultivate their own experimental discourses and methods in dialogue with the visual arts community, which presented artworks in normative settings. Gutai’s early works contributed not only to the development of interdisciplinary arts in the Japanese post-war context, but also to the practices of self-proclaimed curation. They informed and foregrounded artist-centered and process-oriented production. Gutai’s artistic and curatorial practices nurtured a sense of community among its members, which is mirrored in the collaborative ethos of many artist-run initiatives in the following eras.

The three cases examined in the context of postwar periods in their respective locales inspired relevant initiatives and actions throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. During this time, artists collectively interrogated power-asymmetric cultural communication of the everyday and globalisation and proactively questioned what art can "do" with socially engaged acts.

For instance, activist endeavours of the Tokyo artist community continued the spirit of early practices of Gutai and other initiatives.[14] In 1989, amidst Japan’s bubble economy, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art was established as the first public art museum dedicated to contemporary art, in the early 1990s, the proliferation of private galleries with high rental centralized the art market and community excluding spaces for young artists. The Ginburart in 1993, a guerilla art project in Ginza, and Shinjuku Shonen Art in 1994, spearheaded by Masato Nakamura and fellow artists, organized collective actions and performances in the streets of both districts. Playfully and ironically, during the event of Ginburar, for instance, Makoto Aida acted as a beggar to sell his artwork in front of a gallery. Concurrently, a parade named Decorative Tour, resembled a Shinto ritual, connecting both object-based and live works of several participating artists through spontaneous actions.[15]

Similarly, October, as a reference point, would inspire an understanding of the trajectory of Taiwanese theater and performance curation. During the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, artists increasingly initiated and curated events in the Taipei art scene, taking the form of art festivals, and challenging dominant institutional narratives.

A pertinent example of this trend is the Taipei Broken Life Festival, curated by Wu Zhongwei in 1994, alongside artists Jiang Shifang and Li Shiming. This festival took place in an embankment beneath the Yongfu Bridge at the city fringe of Taipei. The curators built scaffoldings to host a large-scale, anarchist-style underground arts festival featuring a diverse array of works including theater, performance art, noise, and video art. The festival counteracted the dominance of cultural elites controlling mainstream performance spaces, standing in stark contrast to the Taipei International Arts Festival organized by the National Theater and Concert Hall in the same year[16].

In Taipei’s theater community, the Critical Point Theatre, following the passing of its founding director Tien Chi-Yuan in 1996—a prominent figure in Taiwan's LGBTQ+ movement—self-curated and organized the Plays in Our Room Festival from 1997 to 2005 in their apartment. This initiative preserved the troupe's collective spirit by showcasing the work of its members, thereby creating a safe space for the theater community and fostering many young talents. This festival and many other artist-run initiatives by Critical Point Theatre positioned the troupe itself as a commune, engaging the young generation of the LGBTQ+ community in the contemporary theater scene during the late 1990s and early 2000s.Another significant event was the Not-Popular-At-All Superstars Festival (1995-1996), curated by the Walker Theatre at the Walker Café, a coffee shop run by the troupe’s members. With the ironic festival title, they brought together artists and amateurs from across theater, dance, music and beyond to present their work collaboratively. Many pieces featured in this festival provoked and engaged with societal conditions in the context of Taiwan's transition to democracy a decade after the lifting of martial law. In 1996, performer Xu Yahong initiated the Taiwan Women Theatre Festival at B-Side Bar with female artists such as Wei Yingchuan, Fu Yuhui, and Tu Shihhue to reclaim space in a theater scene dominated by male voices. The lesbian contemporary theater scene in Taiwan grew from here, and no matter what the sexual orientation of those participating artists and curators, this pioneering festival exemplified a community-based practice that curated and contextualized the community into a discursive progress of cultural activism.

From the Chiang Mai Social Installation to the cases in Tokyo and Taipei in the 1990s, outside institutional settings, "curating art festivals" could have been understood as an artistic practice. Festivals are live embodiments of crafting gatherings for the community, cultivating artist-to-artist cultural spaces. Under socio-politically conditional and conventional resources, festivals have become new stages on which artists open up a broader performance space while addressing the lack of diversity in the arts.

Curating festivals therefore serves as cultural performances and artist-to-artist collaborations. For artists, regardless of discipline, performance has become a strategy they employ to direct ways things go, choreograph how the actions and programs move, and advocate their autonomy while resisting what’s been confined or homogenized as an artist community, through staging the liveness of the artist’s body.

Curating performances can then function as cultural agency, responses, disruptions, and negotiations with specific social, artistic, and (non-)institutional frameworks. The notion of performance-making as curatorial practice in such artist-led/artist-run cases has manifested the intersectional understanding of performance curation and artistic practice. Rethinking Ken Dewey's performance as a curation, and how Gutai, Chiang Mai Social Installation, October, and the other listed gathered artists as collective and collaborative curators, there is scope for contextualizing performance curation as collective action and community engagement. Such practice has negotiated the binary relationship between the center and periphery of power dynamics in cultural infrastructures and institutions, with a tendency to diversify cultural and social spaces and discourse. Performance curation, therefore, is a community-based process that prompts long-term engagement between artists and the general public and fosters specific social and artistic transformation.

River Lin is a Paris-based Taiwanese artist working with live art, dance, and queer culture. He is Curator of the Taipei Arts Festival, Co-Curator of Indonesian Dance Festival, Guest-Curator of 2025 Lyon Dance Biennale and Co-Artistic Director of Something Great, Berlin.