The Hong Kong-born Tang Shu-wing is a theater director and educator and has been working in the professional theater field for 30 years. He has directed more than 60 works, including spoken theater, non-verbal theater, dance theater and opera. Tang is celebrated in the media as one of Hong Kong's most talented theater directors. Minimalist aesthetics and physical theater, which Tang advocates, have become a hallmark of contemporary theater in Hong Kong.
Tang founded No Man's Land in 1997 in an effort to explore different forms of theater expression. He has directed Three Women in Pearl River Delta (1997), Face (1998), Millennium Autopsy (1999), The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other (2000), Between Life and Death (2002) and Deathwatch (2002).
Between 2004 and 2011, Tang worked at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), where he rose from lecturer to dean of the drama school within five years. During this time, he directed Phaedra (2005), Hamlet (2006) and Princess Chang Ping (2007), among others, and trained many new actors.
In 2011, Tang left the HKAPA and founded the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, whose aim is to establish Hong Kong theater on international stages through cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural works. Numerous tours with various productions have taken Tang through China and Asia as well as to Europe. Detention (2011), a non-verbal comedy, was performed 127 times in nine cities in Europe and Asia and reached an audience of 25,000. His dance drama Thunderstorm (2012) won three major awards at the Hong Kong Dance Awards in 2013 and toured Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Taipei and Singapore. In 2012 and 2015, he presented Titus Andronicus and Macbeth in Cantonese at Shakespeare's Globe in London.
At the 2015 Hong Kong Arts Festival, he directed the opera Datong, which was shown as a highlight in London as part of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China. Following his passion for nurturing the younger generation, he directed Les Contes d'Hoffmann (2018) and Idomeneo (2021) at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. In January 2023, he took over the direction of La Bohème at the Hong Kong Opera.
The all-female, non-verbal King Lear (2021), which is now being shown in Berlin, can be seen as part of his ongoing research into the function of the body in various theatrical styles. In his publications Analysis and Reflections on the Theories of Acting of Meyerhold, Titus Andronicus - Approach in Minimalistic Aesthetics & Physical Theatre and Detention - Out of Curiosity, Tang shares his creative experiences with others.
Numerous international awards and appointments to cultural institutions in Hong Kong attest to the respect and esteem in which Tang and his work are held.
