Reviving Tradition with AI: 2025 Huwei Chung-Yuan Festival

In Huwei Township, the Chung-Yuan Cultural Festival during the seventh lunar month stands as one of southern Taiwan’s most significant and vibrant cultural celebrations. Spanning eight major ritual zones and lasting an entire month, the festival brings together thousands of participants to honor ancestors, strengthen community bonds, and showcase the depth of local traditions. Yet in recent years, this once-sacred event—rich with symbolism, elaborate ceremonies, and spiritual meaning—has faced a gradual decline. Generational changes and commercialization have shifted focus away from its cultural essence, reducing it to market-oriented festivities. To reinvigorate this living heritage, we embraced generative AI technology to produce a groundbreaking promotional film. Through dynamic AI-generated visuals, the video reimagines the origins of the Chung-Yuan Festival, faithfully reconstructs traditional rituals and ceremonial scenes, and highlights the unique features of Huwei’s eight ritual zones.

Advanced AI face-swapping transforms the township mayor and other officials into on-screen characters, with pre-transformation designs inspired by Huwei’s renowned glove puppetry (Budaixi) tradition. This integration infuses each character with local artistic flair before they morph into their final roles, adding cultural depth and a playful surprise for viewers. The AI process involved training facial models, generating seamless motion transitions, recreating historically inspired settings, and enhancing visual consistency across multiple scenes, ensuring both cultural authenticity and technical excellence.

Complementing the visuals, an AI-generated original soundtrack was composed, blending powerful drum beats, traditional Chinese instrumental music, and custom sound effects to heighten the atmosphere and bring each scene vividly to life. This fusion of tradition, sound, and technology not only elevates the festival’s visibility but also serves as an engaging bridge between the past and the present, inspiring younger generations and international audiences to rediscover the meaning and beauty of this cultural treasure.