Homeward Exodus, 2010

A live performance with music, wearable sculpture and video projection with Shaw Pong Lu and Aricoco at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio.

The collaborating artists met at the Blue Sky Project; Shaw Pong was the Program Director and Ari Tabei and I were Artists-in-Residence. We shared a common interest in creating something new from our cultural backgrounds (Chinese-American and Japanese) and artistic traditions (painting, classical music, and kimono making).

The performance explored the experience of leaving home in order to seek a new home. We played with the meaning of “home” on three levels:
– Cultural: the scattering of the Asian diaspora (through multiplicity and repetition)
– Spiritual: the transformation of death/black to life/white (through funerary rituals and illumination)
– Creative: the emergence of contemporary art-makers from traditional art forms.