Recording excerpt of orchestral version of PIPA BOY III - “encounters between past and future” by Louisville Orchestra, featuring Baldwin Giang, pipa, and conducted by Teddy Abrams
Excerpt trailer of ensemble and video version of PIPA BOY by Ensemble Garage and Friends, conducted by Elias Peter Brown, recorded at Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi, 2024.
NOTES
PIPA BOY began during my Fulbright Artist Fellowship in Taiwan, where I studied how to play the pipa (a traditional Chinese lute) and composed for the instrument. Conceptualizing a hybrid context in which to feature the pipa alongside western instruments, I realized that the pipa is as much a product of human migration as I am. The video part to PIPA BOY features myself in places where I’ve lived in which identity needs to be interpreted and negotiated, and critically imagines what belonging to a diaspora could mean in the future.
The concept of a ‘post-diaspora’ comes from the writing of theorist Shu-mei Shih, who posits that given the diffuse and post-generational migration of peoples away from their ancestral homelands, “diaspora should have an end date…everyone should be given the chance to become a local.” Though I remain agnostic about whether a utopian ‘post-diaspora’ can or should happen, I’m interested in investigating the conditions of space and time that could make a subject feel both visible and accepted in their cultural difference. One could say that I am seeking and imagining traces of the ‘post-diaspora’ in the present.
The artistic research behind this project was simple: I filmed myself carrying markers of my identity, the pipa and dan nguyet (a traditional Vietnamese lute) while interacting with urban environments to which I have a personal connection. Then I wrote the music in response to the affects generated by the interaction between my identity, the environment, and the medium of video. Lastly, I edited and ordered the video in a non-narrative, but closely integrated syntax with the music.
The first scene takes place in Philadelphia, where I was born. Made in collaboration with Philadelphia-based filmmaker Brian Erickson, I investigate the politicization of the boundaries of Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Against a long history of political organizing from the community, Philadelphia city officials have disrupted the urban geography of Chinatown by installing a highway that bisects the neighborhood and threatened to build a prison and basketball stadium at its edges. In my work, the relationship between video and music explores the thresholds that constitute the identity of Chinatown, and playfully subverts the rigidity of these boundaries.
The second scene, with video in collaboration with Taiwanese filmmaker Chris Kang, is about Ximending, a neon-covered, flashy shopping district in Taipei that blends Asian and western consumerism. I lived a year in this neighborhood, and was interested in how it embodied a drunken, escapist optimism about the future as well as signs of capitalism’s excess. Filmed late at night after the hordes of tourists had left, we feel only the traces of a globalized public in their absence.
The last scene was made in collaboration with Italian filmmaker Andrea Bancone and the actor Gabriele Lepera during my year as a Rome Prize fellow. Our subject was the porousness of place, identity, and history in gay cruising sites around Rome. Filmed at Villa Gordani and Monte Caprino, two beautiful parks with ancient Roman ruins that become hotspots at night for gay sex, as well as Settimo Cielo in Ostia’s beach, we interrogate how queerness and migration intersect with the palimpsestic nature of city life in Rome. Unlike in Philadelphia, boundaries are fluid and slippages are both frequent and discreetly made. Drawing on the work of Jose Munoz, we consider how this porousness allow us to slip between what is present and what is not present, how taking a different look at the past and present that is here allows us to see the horizon of a future not yet here.