Taiwan’s East Coast Festival 2025 returns, with music, art and ritual by the sea
Each summer, Taiwan’s East Coast Land Arts Festival transforms a stretch of coastline between Hualien and Taitung into a stage—not with curtains and lights, but with moonlight, rivers and rituals. Now in its 11th edition, the 2025 festival continues its gentle but ambitious mission: to bring artists, performers and local communities together in a living conversation between land and culture.
The theme this year, “Becoming an Estuary”, offers both a poetic and practical starting point—one that shapes the festival’s performances, site-specific artworks and even the rhythm of its markets and talks. For the Amis people, Taiwan’s largest Indigenous group, estuaries are more than geographic features. They are physical and spiritual thresholds: places where rivers surrender to the sea, fish return with the moon, and where tradition flows forward.
The most anticipated performances of the festival unfold under the stars in the “Moonlit Sea Concerts”, a series of six free concerts, and two ticketed events on 12 July and 9 August. This series discards the typical boundaries of stage design, instead embracing a natural setting where “the ground becomes the seats, the sky the canopy, the sea the curtain and the moonlight the companion.” In this open-air arena, the experience is as much atmospheric as it is auditory.
The concerts pair musicians from Taiwan and across the Pacific with dancers, storytellers and ritualists, many of whom come from Austronesian and Indigenous backgrounds. This year, collaborations with the Taiwan Music Institute and a range of East Coast-based artists will bring together traditional Indigenous polyphony, contemporary Indigenous pop and experimental dance.
The result is a multisensory offering: not just a show, but what organisers call a “visual, auditory and spiritual feast.” Audiences sit barefoot on the grass, wrapped in the gentle breath of the salty sea air, as sound echoes into the ocean night.
Alongside the performances, the festival grounds host a vibrant local market—curated with a focus on sustainability, regional crafts and street food. Here, vendors offer everything from handwoven textiles and ocean-inspired ceramics to dishes made with East Coast ingredients and traditional family recipes.
This isn’t just a side attraction. In many ways, the market is an extension of the festival’s ethos: rooted in land, led by local voices and grounded in ecological care. Each stall reflects a link between people and place, with a strong emphasis on biodegradable packaging, recycled materials and direct community participation. In 2023, this commitment earned the festival a spot on the Green Destinations Foundation’s Top 100 Stories, recognising its work in cultural and environmental sustainability.
Between performances and markets, visitors are encouraged to explore the site-specific artworks that dot the landscape: large-scale, tactile installations created in conversation with their natural surroundings.
Among them is The Back of Faki by Eleng Luluan, a towering form of bamboo and driftwood that recalls the daily journey between mountain and sea. Drawing from her Indigenous heritage, Luluan’s work becomes a monument to repetition and resilience—a kind of physical memory built into the terrain.
Wadihan: Echoes by Hungarian artist Sandor Zelenak is inspired by the echoing choral traditions of Amis music. Constructed from bamboo and steel, the sculpture evokes the call-and-response of valleys and voices, land and people, rhythm and resonance.
Elsewhere, artists Lin Jun-De and Kao Wei-Wei (J Factory) offer Colorful Leaps on the East Coast, a joyful intervention using recycled ocean buoys and green textile layers to evoke flying fish—a species both ecological and mythical in the region’s lore. And in Imin Mavaliw’s Journey to the Source, visitors can rest within an enclosure built from driftwood, shaped like an estuary itself. It’s a space for pause—to sit, to reflect, to listen.
Beyond the headline performances and installations, the festival’s quieter offerings form a vital part of its character. This includes a photography exhibition documenting life on the estuary; a retro market featuring vinyl records, vintage ephemera, and stories from older generations; and a series of lectures and workshops exploring ecology, oral history and daily life on the East Coast.
Workshops often invite the audience—from weaving to cooking—and are led by local craftspeople, many of whom have participated in the festival since its earliest editions.
This rhythm—performance, rest, learning, making—mirrors the natural flow of the estuary itself. At its best, the festival feels less like a programme to be consumed and more like a series of invitations to participate.
At a time when many festivals lean toward bigger line-ups and louder stages, the East Coast Land Arts Festival offers something different: not a distraction from the world, but a re-entry into it. By tuning itself to the tempo of rivers and moons, it reminds visitors that culture is not only made in cities, it grows, slowly and collectively, along coastlines, in conversations and under open skies.
To become an estuary, in the language of this festival, is to allow different voices, traditions, and timescales to meet—to let art flow from land, and land shape art in return.
For more information, visit eastcoast-nsa.gov.tw/teclandart/en
