Lena Chen
PhD Student, UC Berkeley - Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies
Berkeley, California, United States
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Lena Chen (she/her) is an artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her scholarship examines the figure of the Asian America woman as (Tiger) Mother and Whore. Her work appears in the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022), Sex Work Now (NYU Press, forthcoming), and To Be Named (Routledge, forthcoming). She has taught classes on feminist theory, performance art, and socially engaged art. As an artist, she has exhibited, performed, and screened her work internationally. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, Center for Cultural Power, Burning Man Global Arts Fund, Office of Public Art, and others. Currently, she is hosting community workshops on AAPI sexuality to devise a collective performance as part of her practice-based research.
She is a co-founder of JADED, the largest AAPI arts and cultural platform in Western Pennsylvania, and a founding member of MATERNAL FANTASIES, an interdisciplinary collective of mothers/artists and their children. She coordinates the Performing Asian American and Diasporic Sexualities working group at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race & Gender.
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Undoing, Unbecoming: Grief, Care, and Asian American Artist-Scholarship
In meditating upon the political question of “what makes a grievable life?”, Judith Butler makes an affective observation: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.” Obviously, there is no shortage of sources of grief, heightened in the era of COVID-19, but as scholars like Anne Cheng, David Eng, and Shinhee Han have observed, the Asian diasporic subject bears a particular claim to melancholia reflective of a historical context of disavowal and invisibility on one hand, and model minoritarianism on the other. As panelist Takeo Rivera has recently written, “Asian American subjectivity becomes itself through its own undoing.” But what, precisely, constitutes this undoing, situated at the intersection of grief and desire? The papers in this panel contend that this undoing is not only characteristic of the deconstructive instability of Asian American subjectivity so called, but an undoing of epistemological boundaries and methodologies. We thus turn here to Asian American artist-scholarship within performance studies to consider Asian Americans “undone by each other.”
The papers in this panel all share a common investment in the role of arts-scholarship in an Asian America of grief and desire. In doing so, these presentations combine critique and arts practice to explore various modes of intimacy and unbecoming, dissolutions of subjectivity, and unintuitive affects emerging from the legacies of war, exploitation, and marginalization. Through various hybrid ways of knowing and seeing, this panel aims to broaden the space for Asian diasporic communitas, allowing arts practice to provide vulnerabilities and interventions beyond the logocentric. From installation and exhibition to playwriting and video, this panel explores Asian American undoing from multiple media, affects, and diasporic origins. To survey what has already been undone provides us with the materials and methods for engaging with different surfaces of Asian American artist-scholarship.
Fly In Power (film screening)
FLY IN POWER follows Charlotte, a Korean massage worker and core organizer of Red Canary Song (RCS), a social justice collective of Asian diasporic massage workers, sex workers and allies who basebuild through mutual aid. Through her history, we learn how the incarceral system is pitted against Asian migrant women and their survival. The documentary is a glimpse into the intimate spaces that not only connect these women and non-binary queers, but is also a testament to the global advocacy of women’s rights to work and thrive.
FLY IN POWER centers the narrative of an Asian massage worker in her own words, with her own agency of storytelling and editing. With each story shared, we witness the trust built between the film team and the participants. The documentary is directed by Yin Q, a Queer, Chinese American parent, writer, and sex worker rights advocate, and Yoon Grace Ra a cultural organizer working with audio/visual media. This film has been produced entirely by women, non-binary, trans and queers of the Asian diaspora- more than half of the production team are former/current sex workers.
Runtime: 77 minutes
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