Circulating histories

History is transmissible. And the body is its vector.

The idea entered me during a residency in Shanghai. I had just come from Nanjing, a city haunted by its histories. A few days later, a curator invited me to present my first performance-lecture. The idea took shape through this unexpected encounter.

What do we carry in our bodies from histories we never lived through?

I was born in the seventies in Central Java, Indonesia. I am ethnically Chinese. Yet I grew up unable to speak the language. After 1965, as the Cold War intensified across Southeast Asia, the Indonesian state targeted Chinese Indonesians in an anti-communist campaign. Chinese-language schools were closed. People were compelled to abandon their Chinese names.

When I was nine, my parents sent me and my sisters to Singapore. They had to remain in Indonesia. I learnt English and Chinese, and received a Western-centric education. We lived with guardians my father found through newspaper classifieds, and we moved many times. We never lived with our parents ever again. Houses kept changing. Home became an image.

Born translated

In Indonesia, I grew up watching wuxia martial arts series on bootleg VHS tapes. Some were subtitled in Indonesian; others I watched without understanding a word. My family also watched classic Hollywood Westerns on VHS. I later realised that the newest series available in my town were already more than ten years old when we watched them. The tapes had travelled across seas and over land to reach us.

I began to see history as something that circulates between bodies. When that circulation is suppressed, what remains in memory, habits and gestures?

In my art, I translate these fragments into materials, spaces and actions. They take on forms that can circulate again, even when their origins are lost or difficult to recognise. Migration has become a way of making. A poem becomes an action, then an inscription in DNA. Each translation changes its form, and sometimes my understanding of where it began.