PERFORMANCE
What would you say if you could? (III)
February, 2023
[performance]
WU KANG ROAD, shanghai, china
public performance on Wu Kang Lu "the most romantic street" of Shanghai leading up to Valentine's day, exploring secrecy, intimacy, and the things we keep private from one another in our most intimate relationships.
What would you say if you could? (II)
May, 2021
[performance]
TRI SPACE, shanghai, china
Interactive performance with audience, where strangers were connected by pipes to speak and listen.
IN AMERICA, WHY LEAVES ARE GREEN?
livestreamed VR performance
BOND FESTIVAL, 2020
A multi-media work comprised of a split- screen video and a live performance, embodying the paradoxical tensions central to my work as an immigrant artist: How can I authentically tell my stories to an inherently foreign audience, and must I be consumed by the American gaze? Interweaving footage filmed in factories in my mother's hometown in Jiangxi province with found footage from Silk Museums, clashing Chinese legends against its necessarily false English translation, I interrogate the Western viewer: how are you complicit in the orientalization of my homeland? But mostly, I ask myself, how is my lens inherently complicit and a part of this “othering” gaze?
IN AMERICA YOU ARE ASKED
WHY ARE LEAVES GREEN
[film, performance]
Premiered at The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2020
Nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize
Official selection for Prague International Indie Film Festival
Within a ghostly silk forest, a world within worlds, the labor of Chinese factory workers and silkworms are evoked through a satiric reimagining of the Chinese mythology of the Silk-Worm Horse. The work questions censorship, self-censorship, orientalization, and self-orientalization within the context of global late capitalism.
THE YOUNG WHO DISAPPEAR INTO BIRCH
zoom performance
July, 2020
featured on The Tenderness Project
Birch trees grow on the borderlands of China and Russia--the forests are romanticized in the Chinese imagination, and we grew up listening to songs and stories about the far reaches of our border. The performance is set to a song familiar to generations of Chinese people: "Birch Forest" sang by Pu Shu, adapted from an Ukrainian folk song telling a love story of a girl in the birch forest waiting for her boyfriend to return from war—the song hauntingly repeats "the young who disappear into birch." The skins of birch peel, revealing thousands of eyes vigilantly watching its surroundings. On Zoom, we sit amidst this forest of eyes—seen from multiple angles of our monitors—and yet, in this moment of isolation, perhaps we are also kept company by our multiple, digital selves.