The performance project, Tell Me Your Survival Strategy (And She Spoke to Me Softly), is a ritual performance where I prepare a store-bought “Asian” frozen dinner in the microwave and respond to the sounds that the processes produce. Through “singing” along with the microwave oven “cooking” the frozen dinner, I want to use an interdisciplinary approach to engage with the intersectionality of performance, audio art, and language to establish a non-vocabulary conversation that tends to harmonize the mechanic noise while also attempts to break up the harmony.

I want to address how the domestic structure and diaspora identities and cultures are appropriated and commodified by the public social system, and the loss of languages to discuss on this matter. As a queer Asian of the diaspora, I find the word “domestic” holds ambivalent meanings: on one hand, it means the private that’s inside a household; on the other hand, it refers to the public that includes the scope of a nationality. Thus, I utilize the domestic structure as an analogy to the public structure and examine how the body and identity of a queer diaspora are exploited by the Capitalist and patriarchal structures through domestic labors, roles, policies, and abuse in relation to the public realm.

My intention of hosting the live-online performance in the intimate space is to invite the audiences from their intimate space to gaze into the intimate space of mine, which is to propose the questions of how the digital experience can be present to the viewers’ physical space, how the space where I perform is framed in others’ domestic structure, and where the boundaries between spaces invade and transcend each other. I also want to inquire how the intimacy, care, and relationship are manifested in the domestic space and movements that we take granted, and how we can bridge and negotiate such connections that are essential to our (post)pandemic humanities.

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