Art & Performance
Photo by Serena Gabriels and Kledia Spiro. Mobius 2025
Photo by Annielly Camargo. Danza Orgánica We Create Festival 2026
Photo by Annielly Camargo. Danza Orgánica We Create Festival 2026
becoming ancestral mud
becoming ancestral mud embodies, remembers, and imagines femme and queer ancestors from my ancestral village in the northern Shaanxi region of northwest China. Weaving in oral history interviews with my relatives, creation story, folk songs, and spiritual worships, this solo performance offers a coming-of-age story that rekindles ancestral returns, queer lineages, and ecological entanglements.
How do we hold space for grief in the long duration of collapse? As the lotus grows in mud, what else might emerge in the cycles of violence and loss? How might we search for grammars of queer belonging within—not outside of—our abundant ancestral and diasporic lineages?
Performance History:
2024 The Orchard Theater’s Performance Lab
Dramaturg: Xingying Peng; Choreographer: DeVante Love
2025 Tufts “Ecology Now” Symposium
2025 Harvard Burning Refuge Conference
2025 MIT Libratory Practices Conference
2025 Mobius Performance at The Foundry
Collaborator: Zhonghe Elena Li (papercutting artist)
2026 Danza Organica’s We Create Festival
Collaborators: Juliet Salameh, Mar Parrilla, and Yarumi González
Photo by Yolanda He Yang. Pao Arts Center 2025
ART BREAKS:
imagine care & embody wellbeing
Pao Arts Center, in collaboration with BCNC (Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center) Family Services, welcomes Boston-based theater and performance artist Wenxuan Xue as their 2025 Artist-in-Residence. Over a six-session workshop series, Wenxuan facilitates BCNC staff and childcare professional in exploring creativity, art-based self-care, and cultural identity, to foster stronger connections and a deeper sense of belonging among those who support immigrant youth.
Workshops will include nonclinical therapeutic activities, from papercutting to theatre. This initiative responds to high stress and burnout in immigrant-serving professions, equipping staff with arts and culture tools that support their work and well-being.
Photo by Yolanda He Yang. Pao Arts Center 2025
