Daniel Yeung

Hong Kong

Independent Curator / Choreographer / Mentor/ Arts Critic

Graduating from The Chinese University of Hong Kong with major in Fine Arts and minor in Chinese Music, Daniel is a self-taught dancer and was twice awarded scholarships to study choreography in Amsterdam and London. Daniel was raved by Europe’s BalletTanz year book as “The Choreographer to Look At” and was awarded the “Rising Artist Award” by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) in 2002. He is also a seven-time awardee of the Hong Kong Dance Awards (2000, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2020), organised by the Hong Kong Dance Alliance, and twice acclaimed as “Top Five Best Dance Works of the Year” by the South China Morning Post. In 2013, Daniel was awarded by the HKADC as the “Artist of the Year (Dance)” for his immense contributions to the development of dance in Hong Kong as performer, choreographer, dance critic, mentor and curator. In 2020 (till 2022), he was appointed by the Government as Councilor and Chairman (Dance Sector) / Vice-Chair (Arts Criticism) through democratic election for the HKADC. In the same year, Daniel was once again awarded by the Hong Kong Dance Award with the most prestigious “Distinguished Achievement Award”.

Daniel was granted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority for an in-depth research on Dance Festivals and Curatorship from 2013 to 2015, providing him opportunities to research on different successful models of festival programs throughout Europe, and building networks for further collaborations with international dance festivals in Asia. In 2017, Daniel was funded by the Home Affairs Bureau for curating and presenting his first dance festival H.D.X (Hong Kong Dance Exchange) as an inter-Asia festivals exchange program festival, alliance with New Dance for Asia International Festival (Korea), Dance Round Table Project (Taiwan), Fukuoka Dance Fringe Festival (Japan) and Japan Contemporary Dance Network.

Daniel is also an active artist specialised in interdisciplinary and international inter-cultural collaboration. He was invited by the Japan Kyoto Arts Centre three times for teaching and presenting works in the International Creators Meeting and “Hot Summer in Kyoto” workshop festival curated by Monochrome Circus, and has been invited two times as an artistic coordinator and choreographer to set his dance works with choreographers from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia for the Little Asia Dance Exchange network touring program. Daniel has also curated and co-choreographed the multi-media dance work Little Prince Hamlet performed by himself with artists from Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia presented by the Hong Kong Arts Festival 2005. In 2007, he was appointed by the Seoul International Dance Festival as the artistic coordinator for an international collaboration co-choreographed by dance artists from Singapore, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea.

Starting from 2012, Daniel began with his new partnership with Hong Kong Arts Centre for his new project “Open Dance” as Curator and Joint Presenter, which he had produced 17 Open Dances in unconventional performance spaces with diverse dance forms and categories. “Open Dance” has also won him the Hong Kong Dance Award for his concept and contribution on community/environmental and educational dance category.

Recently Daniel has great interest in integrating contemporary dance and Lion Dance (a fresh take on the cultural heritage which has been around in China, and the rest of Asia, for centuries), and exploring more possibilities of how it can be presented. His multi-media production Contemporised-Lion-Dance works have been presented by Taikoo Place theatre ArtisTree as their grand opening program, New Vision Arts Festival, and JCNAP by HKADC in Hong Kong, also Sanriku International Arts Festival in Japan, and tanzmesse in Germany, in which he combined and collaborated with local and international artists from Japan, Taiwan, Belgium, Italy and Poland, ranging from aerial dance, circus, ballet, contemporary dance and Parkour.