Corporeal Forms: Four Stories
Asian Premiere
Chen Wan-Yin, Hsu Che-Yu Germany, Taiwan 2026 45 min Rating To Be Advised
A puppeteer’s hand resurrects the missing and lost bodies of history through four stories in this lecture performance.
A puppeteer breaks the joints of a dead sparrow, reanimating it to fly again. From that gesture, Hsu Che-Yu and Chen Wan-Yin move through four stories about what the imagination conjures, told as oblique microhistories: a laboratory rabbit killed for swine fever vaccine; ancestral portraits whose photographed faces sit on reused studio backdrops painted in Eastern gouache; Mongolia’s last wild horses, bred backwards under the Third Reich and today through surrogates; and conjoined twins separated on live television in 1979.
Animated by master puppeteer Kuo Chien-Fu—who works in budaixi (Taiwanese glove puppetry), where the hand inside the puppet revives its soul—the trio invokes the contradictory attachment to restoring the corporeal semblance of lost things. The original performance was commissioned by Theater der Welt and Taipei Performing Arts Center, and premiered at Frankfurt’s Mousonturm.
Synopsis Writer: Gabriel Goh
Undercurrent, Q&A
24 Oct, Sat 4:00PM / 45 min
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Annexe Studio
25 Oct, Sun 4:30PM / 45 min
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Annexe Studio
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Corporeal Forms: Four Stories
Chen Wan-Yin, Hsu Che-Yu
Germany, Taiwan
2026
Mandarin
English
45 min
Rating To Be Advised
Asian Premiere
Chen Wan-Yin
Chen Wan-Yin is a writer, researcher and filmmaker working across moving image and text. Her research delves into reenactment and the ways corporeality becomes witness to historical evidence and narration. A longtime collaborator of Hsu Che-Yu, she is completing a doctorate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Hsu Che-Yu
Hsu Che-Yu works in video, animation and installation exploring the relationship between image-making and memory. He has shown at Theater der Welt, Fundació Joan Miró, MOCA Taipei, São Paulo Biennial, Bangkok Kunsthalle and New York Film Festival. He won the Taishin Arts Award in 2016 and lives between Taipei and Amsterdam.
Chen Wan-Yin, Hsu Che-Yu, Kuo Chien-Fu
Chen Wan-Yin, Hsu Che-Yu