Featured Performance
焦點表演
Echoes of Formosa
咱台灣查某囝
Aug 22
8月22日
7:30pm - 10:00pm
About the Program
In Portuguese fado music, women have been some of the most recognized voices. In Canada, we present to you two powerful voices that carry the warmth of the Taiwanese diaspora.
Van Lefan of Vancouver writes hope into her bilingual songs. Chynna Lewis of Toronto infuses empathy into her original music. Their musical journeys have led them on different paths, but their Taiwanese background brings them together on this stage. As Taiwanese Canadian women, their songs echo the nostalgia of searching for home, and the resilience of finding truth in their identities.
For the first time, TAIWANfest’s Opening Concert features Taiwanese Canadian voices. Through music, language, and their personal stories, they share the experience of moving across the ocean and navigating two cultures. This is music for the community to see what holds us together. This is a concert for the world to see the linguistic and cultural diversity cultivated within Canada.
Van Lefan (樂凡) is a Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, BC, weaving sound, movement, and visual arts into spellbinding, socially engaged works. Blending voice, guitar, flute, and live electronics, her ethereal soundscapes drift between folk, pop, and experimental forms—offering sonic rituals for reflection, grief, healing, and collective dreaming. Her music becomes a space of enchantment and resistance, rooted in ancestral memory, connection to the natural world, and hope as an active practice.
Her debut album, What Holds Us Together,? is a poetic journey through sound and story, while her latest release, Unsent Letters: To Whom It May Concern (March 2025), deepens her exploration of the personal and political. Lefan has performed at TaiwanFest, Jade Music Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Vines Arts Festival, and international tours in Taiwan. She also works as a sound designer for theatre and as a 4DSOUND technician at Lobe Spatial Sound Studio, crafting immersive, multidimensional listening experiences.
Chynna Lewis is a Pop/R&B singer-songwriter based in Toronto. Her music deftly weaves R&B, soulful vocals, and folk into classic pop songwriting, creating a dreamy, modern, and genre-blurring sound. Her unique style can be found in her most recent self-produced EP “What Are Friends For”. As of late, the EP was spotlighted on CBC Radio One, Exclaim!, as well as a number of major International Spotify Playlists.
As a vocalist, Lewis has supported international and local artists such as Ed Sheeran, Jessie Reyez, Charlotte Day Wilson and Jully Black, and has appeared on world-renowned stages such as the Late Late Show with James Corden, The Budweiser Stage, Scotia Bank Arena, and Toronto Jazz Festival. Recently she opened the Toronto Raptors’ NBA Game by leading both the Canadian and American National Anthems on home court.
Since moving to Canada from Taiwan at the age of eleven, her journey as a young immigrant navigating a culturally in-between identity and finding an unlikely place in the arts is what inspired her to begin writing her own songs on the family piano. These creative instincts eventually led her to her career in music.
Lewis is an alumnus of the Humber College Contemporary Jazz Vocal program, where she studied with Canadian music icons Larnell Lewis and Rik Emmett.
Striving to be a contributor to the representation of Asian artists in the music industry, Lewis is overjoyed to be sharing her first EP with the world. Currently, she is working on her sophomore full-length album, which is set to be released in the Winter of 2025.
From the Curating Team
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TAIWANfest Toronto is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples, that is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered here, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples of this land while we engage in meaningful conversations of culture and reconciliation.