part of the Hong Museum Artists Residency
Picture a No Man’s Land 想像一个无人岛
Hong Museum, Wenzhou, China
experimental theater workshop
In the summer of 2025, I was a long-distance resident of the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, China, working as one of four members of the experimental theater collective The Jelly Troupe, based between China and the United States and collaborating virtually. We were invited to participate in the residency The Plan of Going Home, which asked us to respond to Wenzhou’s local culinary specialty: jelly dishes. Tasked with learning about a dish I might never taste, I focused instead on the tangible and intangible qualities I could access through unusual methods—qualities such as transparency, stickiness, resourcefulness, pride, rocky shores, big changes, and being surrounded by water. These aspects emerged from hours of interviews conducted by my collaborators in Wenzhou and meetings with local legendary jelly dish producers. I wrote experimental theater scores—instructions for myself to try to access these qualities—and, in July 2025, we turned these theater exercises over to a group of thirteen local participants from Wenzhou. This project was a collaboration with Juan Flores, Yezhou Zheng, and Jessica Chen.
rock coat 岩衣 , 2025
Hong Museum Wenzhou, China
virtual performance 30 minutes
The Jelly Troupe presented a series of evening performances following the workshop. Pictured above is my live video essay, unfolding simultaneously in my apartment in Chicago and the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, for an audience of local residents, some of whom had participated in the workshop earlier that day. The performance traced my long-distance research into the jelly dishes—my futile gestures woven from a summer spent imagining dishes I might never taste—delivered through the same screen that keeps me as close and as far away as ever.
The Jelly Troupe at Wenzhou–Kean University Library 2025
experimental theater exercises and exhibition
Wenzhou, China
collaboration with Yezhou Zheng, Juan Flores, Jessica Chen