Black Myth: Wukong's Global Concert Plays Taipei for the First Time
The orchestral concert based on 'Black Myth: Wukong', China's landmark video game, reached Taipei for the first time this weekend — a test of how far Chinese pop culture can travel across a frozen Strait, and an audience answer in the affirmative.
When the first synth notes of 'Yun Gong Xun Yin' — the cloud-piercing overture from the 'Journey to the West' television series that Chinese audiences have known for four decades — rang out in a Taipei theater on Saturday night, the room erupted before the orchestra had finished the phrase. The Black Myth: Wukong global concert, built around the music of 2024's landmark Chinese action game, played the 1,000-seat Legacy MAX venue in Taipei's Xinyi district on September 19 and 20, the tour's first dates in Taiwan.
The concert is an offshoot of 'Black Myth: Wukong', the game developed by Hangzhou-based Game Science that became the first Chinese-made 'AAA' title to break into the global top tier, selling millions of copies within weeks of its August 2024 release and turning the Monkey King — a hero both sides of the Taiwan Strait grew up with — into a gaming icon. Its score, which layers a full symphony orchestra over guqin, chorus and the televisual vocabulary of 1980s 'Journey to the West', is the part of the game fans most often cite as its soul.
State newswire Xinhua's Taipei correspondent reported a games streamer known as Ares telling the wire: 'The moment this music starts, the blood heats up — I feel ready to become Wukong and start swinging the golden staff.' That reaction is the point of the tour: the game's premise and its music draw on a mythological canon that needs no translation in Taiwan, where the same novel is taught in school and the same 1986 TV series was a childhood fixture. Culture is moving across the Strait even as political relations stay frozen.
Mainland coverage of the Taipei stop has been prominent. The story led The Paper's news feed and ran on CCTV's site, a measure of how closely official media now tracks the game as a soft-power asset — a rare area where the two governments' cultural bureaucracies find themselves on the same side of an audience. It is also the latest instance of Chinese pop culture finding Taiwanese listeners: earlier this year a mainland romance drama ended its run by topping charts in Taiwan, crossing a Strait where official exchanges have narrowed.
The Taipei dates were listed on the venue's video wall with the tagline 'Journey West with Music, Listen to Fate' (随乐西行，且听天命), the second half of which riffs on the game's marketing slogan 'listen to fate' — an apt summary of a tour whose next stops have not been announced. For now the tour's Taipei debut stands as a data point in an argument Chinese officials like to make and Taiwanese audiences, at least on this evidence, keep endorsing: that the pop culture China now exports at scale can fill a theater in Taipei even when almost nothing else crosses the Strait so easily.
