Nine Songs is one of Lin Hwai-min’s most important works. As one of the features of Nine Songs, it combines traditional Chinese culture with western modern dance techniques and accepts the way of thinking of modern dance to create a fusion of traditional Chinese culture. In this study, the work Nine Songs serves as the research object, and various perspectives are used to analyze the cultural background and the fusion of East and West in this work. In addition to serving as a valuable reference for the study of the fusion of traditional dance with modern one in East Asia, this research is of great significance in expressing the aesthetic fusion of Chinese and Western dance in order to promote modern dance development.

This paper looks at Formosa (2017), the last full-length dance work by the founder and artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Lin Hwai-min. As a former writer and trained journalist, he is a socially aware choreographer who expresses his concern for his society through dance. I first contextualize his oeuvre with his earlier pieces based on the theme of Taiwan such as: Legacy (1978), Portrait of the Families (1997), White Water & Dust (2014 double bill), and Rice (2013), leading up to this full-length multi-media production. I also explain the hybridized Cloud Gate corporeal training from the East (e.g. taiji daoyin, Chinese martial arts) and the West (e.g. ballet, Martha Graham modern dance technique), as I unravel how Lin Hwai-min executes his citizenship through choreography.