Nien Tzu Weng

《{光 (陰 | 影)}之∞》── [Guāng Yīn] : The lightest dark is darker than the darkest light.

April 9 + 10 + 11 + 12, 2025 - 7.30 PM

Co-presented with MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)

Nien Tzu Weng Affiche

Nien Tzu Weng's journey is unique and fascinating. Her practice has accumulated a wealth of experiences over the years, ranging from traditional Chinese dance to experimental circus, technological game creation, and many other explorations, leading to her current experimental approaches to performance and lighting design. Nien Tzu is a charismatic performer and a creative force bursting with imagination.

In 《{光 (陰 | 影)}之∞》(Guāng Yīn): The Lightest Dark is Darker Than the Darkest Light, Weng deconstructs the cultural underpinnings of her movement practices, experimenting with a “body identity” connected to ancient Taoist concepts. Through the body’s yin and yang aspects, she navigates a fluid, paradoxical state between inner and outer worlds, bridging physical and virtual spaces. The result is an immersive performance where dance, gestures, memory-igniting scenery, luminous robots and personas all meet—intertwined in a layered dreamscape.

Nien Tzu Weng asserts herself in the notion of pleasure and performative play, and her work is a motif for life and bodily reflection.

“光” [guāng] means “light” and “陰” [yīn] means “negative” or “shade.” Together, they form “光陰” [guāngyīn], “time.”
After 15 years in Canada, Nien Tzu Weng goes back in time. The journey is crucial; she must experience what she missed in the past to understand why she had to leave in the first place. After all, when one escapes, a new narrative takes form.

Danse-Cité collaborates with the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) to support an artist who pushes the boundaries of multiple artistic disciplines. Our shared resources will help bring this project to life.

Credits

About the artist

Interview

This show explores your Taiwanese roots. How is this reflected in the show?

Nien Tzu : [guāng yīn]… is a prototyped world in a state of flux—a fractured mirror through which I navigate my Taiwanese roots, not as a fixed identity, but as something shifting, morphing, and expanding. The synthesis of my diasporic experience exists in multiple dimensions at once, just like time in this work: circular, fragmented, nonlinear. It’s not just about reflecting on my heritage; I am more into warp and weave it into new forms, bridging the gap of generations with personal reality with fantasy.

The performance space itself is a constructed dreamscape, layered with personal and cultural imprints. The gallery is inspired by the textures of my childhood: the plush, soft embrace of stuffed animals, the flickering neon lights of Taiwanese night markets, the intricate curves of feng shui gardens, where energy must flow without obstruction. These objects are not just set pieces; they are my living archives, infused with memory and spirit, embodying a belief rooted in Eastern thought—everything, animate or inanimate, has a soul.

In the theater, the 榕樹 (Ficus tree) stands as a silent witness, an altar where ghosts of the past linger. The ficus is known in Taiwan as a spiritual entity, a gathering place for unseen forces. Here, it becomes a collaborator—a screen for projections, a rope-bound partner in movement, rays of lights, forming the roots — a system to be held, and ultimately, surrendered to.

Sound and images breathe diverse life into these memories, drawing from recordings I made in Taiwan during my documentary filming. Rituals of family gatherings for Chinese New Year, enthusiastic energy of civil flighting for democracy of Taiwan during the 2024 presidential rally, the poetic melancholy of my cousin’s wedding—all of these moments live within the sonic space and projection mapping of the work. They are stretched, layered, distorted, creating a soundscape that feels both nostalgic and uncanny, like a past that never fully settles.

Persona building becomes a medium for transformation. I practice state shifting and cosplaying; inspired from my niece and my cat ,and still learning. Slipping into characters that are both extensions of myself and complete fictions. In these moments, I embody archetypes: the glitching avatar, the school girl, the alter, the ancient, the cat. Fabric patterns inspired by traditional Taiwanese textiles and 90s anime aesthetics, blend into a visual language of duality—rooted and displaced, ancient and hyper-modern.

Through this layered approach, [guāng yīn] becomes a prism and crystals, refracting my Taiwanese identity across multiple timelines and realities, making space for fluidity, contradiction, and reinvention.

Your team is made up of digital artists, video mapping and augmented reality designers, and you create an artistic experience between virtual and reality. What is the place of the body and the physical in this creation?

Nien Tzu : My body exists in multiple states throughout [guāng yīn] — it is both hyper-real and disembodied, organic and digital, performer and avatar.

At times, I embody exaggerated, almost cartoonish manga-inspired physicality, moving between virtuosic explosions of energy and moments of suspended stillness. This aesthetic comes from my childhood immersion in anime and video game culture, but it also mirrors how I have felt in my own existence—oscillating between extreme visibility and invisibility, between states of performance and observation.

Then, there are moments where my body dissolves into data. Augmented reality (AR) projections overlay me with digital distortions, trying to touch and feel pieces of memory from my past or future, glitching versions of my presence, fragmented limbs, shadow-like echoes. In some scenes, my live movement triggers digital landscapes to shift, opening portals into extended realities. The body is never just one thing—it is constantly shifting between dimensions, resisting containment.

Revisiting Chinese traditional fan dance technique into contemporary movement practice, I am exploring the paradox of the fan itself— like the yin and yang rotation of Tai Chi, an object of concealment and revelation, control and release. The flick of a fan creates wind, an invisible transient with tangible impact. It becomes a metaphor for diaspora: the invisible push and pull of cultural inheritance, something both delicate and potent.

The Taiwanese ficus tree serves as an anchor in the piece, a pulley system and rays of laser light, I physically interact with, climbing, wrapping, navigation and binding myself to it. The use of rope art, a practice of Shibari movement techniques creates a paradoxical state—tension and surrender, constriction and expansion. Navigating myself through practice of working light and space, reinforcing the question of the body balancing in between subjectivity and objectivity. In being bound, I find a new way of letting go and healing. The tree (as its own diverse symbols and mediums in this universe) becomes both a physical support and a psychological weight, mirroring my own grappling with home fantasy and belonging.

The most intimate and challenging layer of this work is the telepresence video—my grandma in Taiwan watching the performance in real-time, while their presence is projected into performance space as digital avatars. This is a profound reflection of my reality: my connection to home mediated through screens, my family’s faces pixelated by distance. In some ways, they are more real to me as flickering images than as physical bodies. The paradoxical body states remind me of how technology has always been my bridge to home—how I have maintained relationships, shared grief and joy, and remained connected across oceans. The body, in this performance, is both grounded and fragmented, just as I have often felt in my own experience.

Dance, new media art performance, video, the immersion is maximum, the experience is multidimensional. What do you want audiences to experience?

Nien Tzu : I want the audience to feel like they are stepping into a living portal—where time bends, where memory is fluid, where identity is a shape-shifting entity.

[guāng yīn] is not about arriving at a singular truth—it is about experiencing multiplicity. I want the audience to navigate different states of presence, moving between hyper-stimulation and deep contemplation. In the gallery, they are free to wander, to interact, to be immersed in a chaotic, dreamlike environment where objects, sound, and movement blur the lines between the real and the surreal. In the theater, they are seated, drawn into an introspective, ritual-like unfolding of time.

The use of non-linear storytelling—blending personal documentary footage from Taiwan with the live performance—invites the audience into a space where past and present coexist. Scenes of my family’s Chinese New Year rituals, my cousin’s wedding, the energy of the 2024 presidential rally—these moments are interwoven into the performance, not as static memories but as living, breathing fragments that ripple into the present.

The extended reality elements further disrupt the perception of what is real. The interactive claw machine—a nostalgic arcade experience reimagined through Unreal Engine—invites the audience to play with digitized objects from my childhood. Taiwanese fabrics, family heirlooms, personal artifacts have been scanned into this machine, turned into data, yet they still carry emotional weight. The act of reaching, of grasping, of trying to hold onto something that is always slipping away—this is the core of Guang Yin.

[guāng yīn] is a meditation on displacement and belonging within a prototyped world. It speaks to those who have ever felt caught between worlds—culturally, psychologically, temporally. It is an invitation to embrace paradox and any possible failures, to live within ambiguity, to find beauty in the act of continual transformation.

Ultimately, I would like audiences to leave the space not with answers, but with a heightened sense of possibility—of body identity as something fluid, time as something elastic, and presence as something that extends far beyond the physical— maybe if body as a whole, one finger is physical the rest are virtual and the eyes are spiritual, and our understanding organs are totally surreal.

Credits

About the artist

Interview

Practical Informations