DANIEL YEUNG CHUN-KONG

Choreographer, Dance Educator, Arts Critic & Festival Founder

Graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong with major in Fine Arts and a minor in Chinese Music, Daniel is a self-taught dancer and was twice awarded scholarships by Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund for his further studies of choreography in London and The Netherlands. 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 2003. He is also a six-time awardee of the Hong Kong Dance Awards (2000, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014), organized by the Hong Kong Dance Alliance, and twice-won “Top Five Best Dance Works of the Year” from the South China Morning Post. In 2013, Daniel was awarded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council as the “Best Artist of the Year (Dance)” for his total contributions on curating, choreographing, performing, teaching and criticism on developing Hong Kong dance culture.

The same year, Daniel had been 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 exploration on collaborations with different 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 programs festival, alliance with New Dance for Asia Festival (N.D.A.) International Festival from South Korea, Dance Round Table Project from Taiwan, Fukuoka Dance Fringe Festival (F.F.D.F.) and Japan Contemporary Dance Network (J.C.D.N.) from Japan.

Daniel is also an active artist specialized in interdisciplinary and international inter-cultural collaboration works. He has been 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 dance works 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 alternative 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 Arts Development Council in Hong Kong, also Sanriku International Arts Festivals 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.