Sounding Light

Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. Founded in 1973 by choreographer Lin Hwai-min, Cloud Gate became the first contemporary dance company in the Chinese-speaking world. In 2020, Cheng Tsung-lung succeeded Lin as Artistic Director, bringing together a deep grounding in tradition with perspectives shaped by the digital and globalised world. Cloud Gate celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023.

Drawing on classical, folk, and modern dance traditions from both Western and Asian cultures, Cloud Gate engages closely with history, society, and lived experience. Its dancers are trained in meditation, qi gong (an ancient breathing practice), internal martial arts, modern dance, and ballet, with training further expanded under Cheng to include a wider range of movement practices such as street dance. Through its choreography, the company transforms ancient aesthetics into a contemporary language of movement.

Cloud Gate has toured extensively worldwide and is widely recognized as “Asia’s leading contemporary dance theater” (The Times), and “one of the best dance companies in the world” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). The company was also honored with the “Outstanding Company” award at the 2018 UK National Dance Awards.

Cheng Tsung-lung became the Artistic Director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in 2020 when he succeeded founder Lin Hwai-min.

As a child, he sold slippers on the streets of Taipei, and his experiences of street life and folk and religious cultures have shaped a choreography known for its vivid engagement with the richness and diversity of human experience.

Praised by The Stage as a choreographer with “an eye for a cinematic moment,” Cheng has received recognition both internationally and in Taiwan, collaborating with dance companies and artists around the world. His recent creations for Cloud Gate include 13 Tongues (2016), which evokes the vibrant streets of his childhood through folk dance and Taoist chant; Lunar Halo (2019), set to music by Sigur Rós, hailed by The Telegraph as “a luminously and bleakly beautiful take on the internet-infested 21st century”; Sounding Light (2020), reflecting the solitude of the pandemic era; Send in a Cloud (2022), a poetic meditation on the passage of life through shifting colors; WAVES (2023), co-created with Japanese digital artist Daito Manabe, exploring the intricate entanglement between technology and humanity; and his most recent work, All Ears (2025), which invites audiences to discover movement through deep listening.

Cheng is a fixture in Routledge’s respected annual survey of leading dance practitioners, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (2020), alongside the likes of William Forsythe, Akram Khan, and other leaders in the field.

Lin Hwai-min founded Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in 1973 and has led the company to international prominence through his thrilling creations that transform Asian aesthetics into a contemporary celebration of motion.

Among the honors Lin Hwai-min has received are the Samuel H. Scripps /American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the John D. Rockefeller Award, New York; the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, France; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Movimentos International Dance Festival, Germany. He has also been celebrated by Time magazine as one of “Asia’s Heroes”.

At the end of 2019, Lin Hwai-min stepped down as the Artistic Director of Cloud Gate and handed the reins of the company to Cheng Tsung-lung.