trying now to write this text that we need, also as a way for me to find my way in the piece, to understand better. please tell me what you guys think, we can make small english proposal from here…

Oversea is a collaborative project by Simone Truong, Monika Truong and Elaine W. Ho, three huaren, or overseas Chinese, who have come together quite intuitively with shared backgrounds, mutual forms of identification and certain unspoken yet quite tangible means of understanding one another.

The work is a multi-channel installation and performance, but at the same time, these categories and a labeled identity seem somehow too fixed a point to explain a movement in dance or a flicker on the video screen. It becomes much more interesting to look at identity by way of its maneuverability, to understand how the event of performance is as much an exploration on the performativity of identity, whether we are at the scale of nations, culture, or just the space between two people.

The working process began with an ethnographic approach, and, as we start with ourselves, it became a conscious decision to begin with the stories of others like us. Interviews and conversations with overseas Chinese in Switzerland and some that have returned to China to live form a basis ground from which these mutual forms of identification were allowed to take flight.

The distance of “Oversea” is a literal stretching across oceans, but we began to look at the stretching of these distances both temporally and spatially in the context of Chinese identity. How are history and memory embodied in the moving body over the distance of generations, knowledge lost and the spaces between community and identification?