Zuni Theatre Season 25/26: Hong Kong-style Experiment Zuni Theatre Season 25/26: Hong Kong-style Experiment Zuni Theatre Season 25/26: Hong Kong-style Experiment

2025.5: Mathias Woo Detective Theatre 13.67 2.0

2025.8: Jockey Club Learning Chinese Culture through Arts Tech Theatre Programme — Palace Museum 36500

2025.9: Shanghai x Hong Kong Experimental Arts Tech Theatre — A Cantonese dark drama Left Unsaid

2025.10: Danny Yung Young Artist Academy & Danny Yung Experimental Theatre Meeting of Gods: The School

2025.11: Creaive Arts Tech Cantonese Opera Field of Dreams

2026.1: Jin Yong Xiqu Theatre — The Smiling, Proud Wanderer & Guided Performance — The Smiling, Proud Wanderer Meets Xiqu

As Zuni enters its 43rd anniversary, looking back, we have consistently pursued diverse “experiments” across different eras. These experiments are closely linked to art, technology, tradition, culture, and society. At a time when the world and China are moving into the era of artificial intelligence and panoramic sound technology, we innovate through experimentation, telling Hong Kong stories with diverse methods. Art must innovate through technology so that new life can be injected into traditional art. The mode of viewing artistic creations is changing, and the modes of learning art and acquiring knowledge are also being innovated within the technology ecosystem. Hong Kong has always played a pioneering and innovative role in telling Chinese stories. Zuni’s experiments over the past 40 years have also involved absorbing traditional artistic concepts to create new forms of artistic experience.

“Hong Kong-style Experiment” showcases Hong Kong’s core characteristics: rapid response and innovation. Rooted in the fundamental concepts of Chinese cultural tradition, Hong Kong has nurtured an open, cross-disciplinary, cross-media, cross-cultural, and cross-technological cultural atmosphere. The flourishing of Hong Kong cinema is a manifestation of this experimental spirit—from the special effects in Ling Wan’s 1964 film The Buddha’s Palm, to the science fiction works of Alex Cheung and Tsui Hark, and classics like The Storm Riders, all showcasing the extraordinary charm of innovative technology.

In recent years, Zuni has been committed to promoting basic education in culture and art, and the fundamentals of Chinese culture, through the use of art technology. In today’s mobile phone-dominated era, the ways we watch plays, movies, and listen to music are changing. We hope to use art technology to guide children to walk out of the flat world of mobile phones, allowing them to enter real physical spaces for cultural creation and practice. To nurture future creators, we need to plant seeds of culture in children’s growth. As they grow, some will become audiences, and others may become creators, thereby creating more Hong Kong stories and Chinese stories.

Zuni, through art technology, is attempting innovative forms of creation to enhance the viewing experience. We are also trying to reinterpret tradition with modern visuals, integrating contemporary techniques into traditional art. This year’s programme, the Experimental Naaynam Cantonese Operaa Field of Dreams, and Jin Yong Xiqu Theatre – The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, adapted from Jin Yong’s classic works, aim to attract diverse audiences to experience art through new technologies. At the same time, we hope to preserve the traditional spirit of Chinese opera, while injecting contemporary vitality through art technology, bringing traditional art back into the public eye.

Hong Kong’s greatest current lack is “space”. Zuni is very honoured to receive the support of Henderson Land Development Company Limited to establish a five-year “Art Technology Laboratory.” This is a significant milestone for Zuni. The laboratory will enable Zuni to conduct experiments of various kinds in art technology and innovation, provide talent training, elementary or professional art technology courses, and seminars or workshops for the industry to deepen their understanding of new equipment. Zuni hopes to use this laboratory, and its more than 40 years of experience in experimental art technology, to enhance Zuni’s creative practices, provide better and more experimental practices, and help to build a cultural environment favourable for long-term sustainable development. It unveils the greatest challenge and a precious opportunity at the same time.

An experimental art pioneer, Danny Yung is a founding member cum Co-Artistic Director of Zuni Icosahedron. Yung is widely regarded as most influential artist in Hong Kong and the neighbouring regions, and an advocate in experimental arts and new art forms.

In the past 40 years, he has been actively engaged in various fields of the arts, including theatre, film and video, comics, as well as visual and installation art. Yung has contributed significantly to the provision of a platform for both acclaimed and emerging artists to explore and carry out cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration. As director, scriptwriter, producer and stage designer, Yung has created over 100 theatrical productions, which have widely toured to over 30 cities in North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2022, Yung received the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts by Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

As the co-artistic Director cum Executive Director of Zuni Icosahedron, Mathias Woo leads a career as a scriptwriter, director, producer as well as curator. His works con-struct aesthetics in theatre through strong visual images and have toured in cities around the world such as Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei, Berlin, Brussels, Krakow, Milan. Woo’s theatre works explore subjects as wide range as literature, history, current political affairs, architecture, and religion.