Archives of Longing - Performance
Event details:
Whom does the archive serve, and what opportunities do we have to recover it? Do archives leave space for the elusive memories, and the silences that we inherit? In this two-day performance and workshop, our exploration of Chinese biographies becomes a way of gathering a different kind of archive – those shaped by longing.
Friday 7-9:30PM: A night of sound, texts, and video installations to find alternative ways of making sense of the lapses in archives in contemporary China and Chinese biographies. In these biographies, we trace multiple narratives — of dementia, of longing, and of our families’ migrations both to and out of China.
Saturday 3-6PM: A workshop that explores methods for re-piecing and recovering gaps in biography. Through letters, photographs, musical notation, and printmaking, participants will together create a collective archive of the day.
Presenters:
Wah-Ming Chang (writer, New York City), Fred Lai (anthropologist, London School of Economics), Jennifer Lee (art historian, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Suvi Rautio (anthropologist, City University New York/University of Helsinki).
Sponsors:
The European Union
KEI PhD Fund, London School of Economics
BIOS
Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist currently based in New York City. Her work engages with collective memory, cultural heritage, and the lived dynamics of encounter. Drawing on love letters, oral histories and photographs, her current book project traces her own family history to unravel the experiences of intelligentsia inter-racial families that lived through the turmoil of the Maoist era. She is particularly drawn to understand how ‘othering’ and stigmatization were upheld and justified through political movements at the time, and how such sociopolitical practices continue to shape contemporary China today. https://suvirautio.com/
Fred Lai is an artist-anthropologist currently based in London. His academic work focuses on dementia care and its intersection with kinship, memory, place-bound lived experiences, and negative histories. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta region in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. The outcome of this project includes his PhD thesis at London School of Economics, a series of ethnographic woodprints exhibited in Basel 2025, a co-authored fiction story for the Singapore Biennale 2022, and a self-published artist book The City Oblivious. Fred welcomes potential collaborations with artists and researchers who have shared interests. Fred Lai - LSE
Jennifer Dorothy Lee is a scholar of art history currently based in Chicago. Her current project explores belonging and displacement as well as music from Asia to Europe among her family of musicians. Immersed in her family’s wartime migration and dispersal amid 20th-century global upheaval, Lee weaves biography, storytelling, fragments of poetry, as well as musical notation to open up the meanings of diaspora across three continents. A recent Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant recipient, Lee will also be a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in autumn 2026.
Wah-Ming Chang is a writer and bookmaker based in Brooklyn, New York, whose work explores the voids found in family mythologies. Her fiction has been supported by the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has appeared in Joyland and The Kenyon Review, among other publications. Hand, Held, her artist’s book about her father's art practice, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves in 2026; an iteration of Hand, Held was displayed in the 39 Footnotes group exhibition at Accent Sisters in February 2025, and an excerpt appears in Epiphany Magazine.