Chen Ming-Yi - Actor Portraits

Chen Ming-Yi is a theatre practitioner whose work moves between performance, playwriting, and theatre-making. Born in Taipei, he spent much of his childhood moving with his family around the edges of the Taipei Basin, from Sanxia and Yingge to Yangmingshan, Nangang, and Xizhi. Growing up without a single place that remained home left him with an uncertain relationship to belonging and, eventually, to identity itself.

He describes himself as “a person without subjectivity.” Rather than simply suggesting an absence of self, the phrase speaks to a habit of emptying himself out: remaining light enough to leave, adapt, and inhabit something else. Across moving, creating, and performing, he has learned to enter different positions and identities without necessarily allowing any one of them to become permanent.

Even his name carries this ambiguity. Ming-Yi (名義) literally means “in name” or “nominally,” turning his own name into an ongoing question: Who am I? Who else can I be? Can I be defined at all?

One of my encounters with his work was a staged reading of Missile (《飛彈》). A group of strangers gathered in a room, received the script on the spot, took on different roles, and read the entire play together.

Beginning with the launch of a missile and a neighborhood meeting descending into conflict, Missile appears to imagine a war across the Taiwan Strait. Yet the real battle takes place among ordinary people. Misinformation, cognitive warfare, cultural influence, and conflicting political positions gradually divide the characters until war no longer requires a visible enemy. It becomes something embedded within everyday life.

For a brief period, a room of strangers became fictional characters, speaking through identities and positions that were not necessarily their own. When the reading ended, those identities were put down again.

That temporary movement into and out of another self echoes something in Ming-Yi himself: a person continually moving, emptying, inhabiting, and leaving, while keeping open the question of who, exactly, Chen Ming-Yi is.