Art, Movement, and Gratitude with Huang Yi

Behind the precision of robotics and the poetry of movement lies a story of resilience and grace. Before the acclaim, Huang Yi began his artistic journey with little more than a vision and determination. In this talk, he reflects on how scarcity became a source of creativity and how gratitude continues to guide his work and relationships within the ever-evolving landscape of art and technology. This talk will be moderated by Aaron Sherwood, Associate Arts Professor of Interactive Media at NYUAD

Huang Yi

Taiwanese dancer, choreographer, inventor, and videographer Huang Yi’s pioneering work is steeped in his fascination with the partnership between humans and robots. He interweaves continuous movement with mechanical and multimedia elements to create a form of dance that corresponds with the flow of data, effectively making the performer a dancing instrument. Named by Dance Magazine as one of the “25 to Watch,” Huang was immersed in the arts at a young age, spending much of his childhood in his parents’ studio watching them teach tango and learning to paint alongside his father. Huang has been Artist-in-Residence of the National Theater & Concert Hall, the National Performing Arts Center, Taiwan, and is widely considered one of Asia’s most prolific choreographers. 

Huang’s groundbreaking and award-winning work, HUANG YI & KUKA, in which he and his dancers perform alongside an industrial robot he programmed, has opened the Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), TED Conference (Vancouver), and toured globally since 2015, including in Australia, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the UAE. 

Huang Yi premiered Under the Horizon, a hybrid opera, in collaboration with Berlin-based Ryoichi Kurokawa and the Netherlands Chamber Choir, in Holland and Taiwan in 2018. In February 2019, he premiered A Million Miles Away at Taiwan's celebrated National Theater. His latest work, Ink, premiered at the National Taichung Theater and the National Theater in Taipei in June 2023.

Aaron Sherwood

Aaron Sherwood is an interactive media artist and musician, creating large-scale multi-sensory installations and performances. Exploring consciousness, cosmopoiesis, embodiment, entropy, and semiotics, he plays with patterns of emergence in seemingly chaotic systems. People are often placed in the center of these systems, positioned between the micro and macro worlds. People are not mere spectators, but directly influence the complex systems Sherwood creates, enabling the systems to come alive. This mutual "making/forming" allows participants to experience their relationship to Environment in new ways.

His work has been shown at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Cameron Arts Museum, Federation Square (Australia), Telfair Museums, Google, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Future of Storytelling conference, Scopitone Festival (France), Burning Man Arts Festival, Bonnaroo Music Festival, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal), Festival of Curiosity (Ireland), Currents New Media Festival, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and many more.

In 2011, along with Kiori Kawai, he founded Purring Tiger, a non-profit, multi-cultural, multimedia, experimental performance group dedicated to bringing people together in the context of art, in a subtext of wonder.

Currently, he is an Associate Arts Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi.