A group of unnamed people see off the gods.
A sedan chair brings home the gods of unknown origin.
Countries and borders keep shifting, and so the story of homecoming turns in circles, again and again. The spirit lives inside the statue; the god's body moves in and out of borders drawn by others. This is a journey across borders in which people become ghosts, ghosts become gods, and all spirits are one. The gods have lost their divinity — adrift, self-sufficient, speaking in riddles. All that's left is fiction.

"Gods in Exile" takes as its starting point the people who lost their official identity amid Japan's imperial colonisation of East Asia during the Second World War. Seven performers and a live sound artist tell this story as a fable, exploring statelessness and nationhood, the crowds and spaces of religious ritual, and the relationship between history and myth — asking how people who were cut adrift from their own time and place carried on living after the war.

Sun Son Theatre has spent many years developing its practice of "performer as one with music and dance", weaving together physical movement, drama, live music and chant. For this 2025 production, the company again joins forces with Koh Choon Eiow — winner of the Grand Prize at the 22nd Taishin Arts Award and Best Script at the 1st Taipei Theatre Awards — together with live musician and sound designer Saito. Together they trace how Sun Son's actor training feeds into its performance method, using the work to ask how people today carry forward the past, and how we draw borders — and how identity and belief keep shifting.​

Arts Review: Yizai Seah
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"Sun Son Theatre has long worked at the intersection of music, dance and the body. This production draws on the company's growing engagement in recent years with identity, national borders, history and cultural difference, and delivers a striking, well-rounded piece of theatre. Under writer-director Koh Choon Eiow, the fable form built around the trauma of war is given full theatrical shape; the live music, sound, lighting, costume and set design all sit precisely where they should within the Asian world the production sets out to build. Nationality of the Gods marks a key turning point for Sun Son Theatre, and stands as a milestone that draws together this stage of the company's work."