KIAC

Born in Taipei in 1980 to Taiwanese parents, Yu-Ju Wen moved to Japan at a young age and grew up in Tokyo. She made her literary debut in 2009 with “The Good Luck Song”, which won an Honorable Mention at the 33rd Subaru Literary Prize. In 2013, she participated in Port B's theater project “Tokyo Heterotopia”, writing a story about the lives of Asians in Tokyo. In 2016, she received the Japan Essayist Club Award for “Born in Taiwan, Raised in Japanese” (published in Taiwan as “I Live in Japanese”). In 2020, she won the Oda Sakunosuke Prize for “The Chirping of ló·-bah-pn̄g”. Her novels include “The House of Laifu, Airport Time, Forever Young, Banquet” and more. Other notable works include “Setting Off from 'National Language' and In a Country That Is Not Mine”, among many others.

The Tokyo-based Jang-Chi directs and conceives performances. He founded the artist group OLTA in 2009. He has developed humorous and provocative works through negotiating the systems of visual/performing arts and sociological/folklore fieldwork. With a focus on the collective acts that visible in communities and the communication that unfolds there, he explores questions about the creative act and, by extension, primordial human desire, sensation, and aspiration. His work reconfigures and restages past voices, records, folk tales, work songs, movements, incidents, and so on, dealing with urban planning during modernization, industrial structures, society and history that cannot be applied uniformly across race and gender, and repeated structures. OLTA have presented their work at various venues and events, including YPAM Direction (Yokohama, 2021/2022/2023), ROHM Theatre Kyoto (Kyoto, 2020/2024), Lilith Performance Studio (Sweden, 2015), and Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival (South Korea, 2014). Their notable works were exhibited nationwide, including at the Aomori Museum of Art (2019), Busan Biennale (2016), and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2014). Since 2022, he is a Fellow of the Saison Foundation (Tokyo / JP).

Born in 1991, Angeles City, Philippines. Ness is an actor, dramaturg and educator. Her practice is anchored by inquiries into transdisciplinary, feminist, and decolonial practices in theater, contemporary performance, and education. Ness is currently pursuing further studies in Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices at the Tokyo University of the Arts under the MEXT Scholarship Grant. She is part of Salikhain Kolektib, an interdisciplinary collective that integrates art, research, education, and community engagement to create collaborative artworks and initiatives throughout the Asia Pacific.

Working in theater production, performance, graphic art. Since 2009, he has created and published performances under the name of Style Lab. At the same time, he has been invited to cooperate, co-create, and consult as a personal director. The fields of his cooperation work are diversified, including contemporary theater, performing arts, visual arts, sound and audiovisual arts, etc. His works focus on the cognitive texts and magical performances/narratives of the experience scene, as well as their relationship with people and the interaction of the performance. He actively tries creative approaches in various fields mostly through collective improvisation. He draws materials from life situations and daily life, focusing on the ambiguity and its synesthesia, and using theater art as a medium and creative method. Recently he has more performing arts regarding language produced by art and contemporary techniques, as well as the contemporary Taiwanese identity perception and mixed culture/reality.

Kyoto Experiment is an international performing arts festival that has been held annually in Kyoto since 2010. Inviting radical artists from Japan and abroad, the festival introduces stage works that freely cross genres. At the same time, the festival aims to serve as a meeting point between society and cutting-edge art/culture, fostering thinking and dialogue about experimental artistic expression.
Through carrying out projects in the performing arts as well as a wide range of art/culture fields, the festival aims to encourage international cultural exchange and cultivate the development of art/culture in Kyoto, thereby contributing to the improvement and prosperity of citizens' lives. In recent years, the festival has also focused on building new networks and promoting exchanges between artists in Asia.