Russ Ligtas & Szu-Ni Wen

Period: 2025/08/01 ~ 2025/09/30

Nation: Philippines, Taiwan

Genre: Performance, Installation, Film, Theater

Szu-Ni Wen is an active theater director in Taiwan, known for her unique style. She excels at blending daily life with artistic creation, focusing on the relationship between urban development and people, while also exploring local memory and identity. She has participated in numerous international collaborations, highlighting the translation and misinterpretation of cultures, and hopes to strengthen connections and cooperation between Taiwan and other Asian countries. She often experiments with creating in non-theatrical spaces, incorporating audience participation to challenge perspectives on viewing.

Russ Ligtas is a poly-disciplinary Filipino artist living in New York City. He works in performance, installation, sculpture, 2D, and film to create immersive experiences that unravel the nuances of autobiography as direct consequences of historical, geo-political, ecological, and mythological narratives. These often emanate from a roster of alter egos—archetypal incarnations that manifest as presence, persona, and myth—“avatars” that radiate towards various iterations of hybridity and intermedia. For more than a decade, these have been his ritualized responses to a queer postcolonial subjectivity existing in the Anthropocene. He met Szu Ni Wen in Taipei through the ADAM Project ArtistLab.  He now knows her like a sister and classmate in the school of reality.  Their hometowns, Kaohsiung and Cebu, are also sister cities. They have been working together on the topic of solidarity and war since 2019.