Three Summer Arts Festivals by Taipei Performing Arts Cener x Taipei City Governement

Taipei’s three summer arts festivals, the Taipei Children’s Arts Festival, Taipei Arts Festival, and Taipei Fringe Festival, are all grand events co-organised by the Taipei City Government and the Taipei Performing Arts Center. These festivals open the door for people to engage with the arts, while enveloping Taipei in an atmosphere of creativity and artistic expression.

Taipei Children’s Arts Festival

The 26th edition of the Taipei Children’s Arts Festival will take place from 28 Jun – 2 Aug 2025. Audiences of all ages are invited to reconnect with their inner child as they experience an amazing arts adventure. This year’s festival features over 100 exciting programmes presented by 29 outstanding groups hailing from Taiwan, the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, and Spain – providing a wide range of cultural perspectives.

The festival’s rich content ranges from light and shadow to puppetry, music, and drama. Free activities will also be held in Taipei City’s 12 districts. For the first time, the festival will be expanded to include storytelling events at public preschools, alongside three large-scale outdoor performances. Moreover, interactive exhibitions and workshops offer families opportunities to experience art up close. With more than 110,000 participants expected, Taipei will transform into a vibrant urban arts playground.

From exquisite performances inside theatres and surprising encounters in the city neighborhoods to inclusive workshops and interactive exhibitions, the Taipei Children’s Arts Festival invites all children at heart to join in a summertime arts adventure of imagination, creativity, and cultural diversity.

 

Taipei Arts Festival (11 – 28 Sep)

The theme for the 2025 Taipei Arts Festival is Reeling Hyperreality.  Audiences are invited to take part in real-time experiences that cannot be fast forwarded or replayed. As festival curator River Lin notes, in this era dominated by hyperreality and augmentation, fiction is all that remains. Our lives are dominated by algorithms and social media that are updated in real time. Meanwhile, theatre, which were once thought of as a fictional and old-fashioned medium, is becoming more realistic and attractive.

In this year’s festival, German artist Susanne Kennedy’s work follows the life and death of an Internet celebrity, interweaving the digital and the real. Maria Hassabi from Cyprus uses a slow movement language to explore the relationships between bodies and spaces. contact Gonzo X yang02 from Japan collaborated on the development of a generative AI and improvisational human-machine fight club. Melati Suryodarmo from Indonesia showcases her exploration of the deep connections between the body and emotion in performance art.

This year’s festival also highlights Taiwanese artists and international co-productions: new media artist Wen-Chi Su uses VR and choreography in the creation of an encounter with invisible dark matter. Chien-Han Hung, Wei-Yao Hung, and Ray Tseng form a family triangle while integrating art and life, following a same-sex couple’s journey to find a sperm donor. Ming-Chen Lee, Jang-Chi (Japan), Ness Roque (Philippines), and Yuju Wen travel thousands of miles in search of their relatives through food and language. Ciwas Tahos and Nanako Matsumoto (Japan) are seeking to mend the forgotten legends of the Atayal people and Temahahoi, as they deconstruct and reconstruct narratives around female sexuality.

 

Taipei Fringe Festival (23 Aug – 7 Sep)

Based on the spirit of diversity and openness of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, various spaces serve as performance and exhibition venues, with more than a hundred performances unfolding across the city at the Taipei Fringe Festival. As such, the festival offers artists a diverse, unrestricted, experimental, and imaginative performance and exhibition platform.

This year’s visual theme features a bright pink sheep. It was chosen to subvert the inertia of daily routines and rethink the relationships among the arts, city, and existence. This year marks the festival’s 17^th edition and is the largest in its history, with more than 170 groups of domestic and international creators having registered to present 190 programmes across 40 venues, amounting to a total of 870 performances which are expected to infuse this city with creativity. The pink sheep can appear at the corner of a lane, on the wall along a staircase, or even in a sleepy dream-like state, raising awareness of art as not just a moment on a stage, but an energy that penetrates daily life and brings new ideas.

Taipei is a city that embraces the unknown and uncertainty. The Taipei Fringe Festival aspires to become an important platform for discovering a new generation of artists. Through resident critics, observers, and Fringe Awards audience evaluations, potential creative talents are identified and supported with exhibition and performance opportunities, ensuring that this city continues to move forward in collaboration with artists.