Show time: wednesday 28th of May at 20h during Vruchtbare Grond festival
We asked Pushing Hands collective some questions:
What’s your background? The Pushing Hands collective has five members, Ching Shu, Di, Johanne, Many and Zeph. All members are based in Brussels and have lived there for several years; we are active members of a larger Asian queer collective called St1ckyr1ce.Pushing Hands collective is designed to be shared and contribute to St1ckyr1ce’s research on diverse Asian approaches to arts and community, collective sustainability, resilience, and rest. The four members of Pushing Hands collective have worked together on multiple projects under St1ckyr1ce and are often present in each other’s personal projects, for instance, as performers, assistants, technical or organisational help. All of us work in the cultural sector: Ching Shu is a performer and choreographer, Di is a cultural anthropologist, Johanne, Many and Zeph are visual and sound artists. All of us have an ethnic relationship to Sinophone culture in some form; most of us can speak Mandarin as a common language and have roots in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Singapore. The Pushing Hands collective’s proposition is rooted in the framework of Sinophone Studies and our on our common interest in creating spaces to gather people and push hands to dance music. Pushing hands comes from a contact practice that used in martial arts as a form of warm up, centring, and balance training. We wanted to expand the consensual and social aspects of this practice in the context of migrants living in the city. Sinophone Studies (華語語系研究) examines Sinitic-language cultures and communities on the margins of China and Chineseness, both outside geopolitical China — formed through historical migration and settlement — and within China, where non-Han Chinese groups navigate Han cultural dominance through various responses, from assimilation to resistance. It intersects with postcolonial, ethnic, transnational, and area studies, emphasising historically and geographically specific contexts. We understand conventional notions like ‘the Chinese diaspora’, to be limiting, as the terms are inherently comparative and transnational (Shu-Mei Shih, 2010: 29, Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays).
What does your work aim to say? In our collective work, we take pushing hands not only as a physical exercise but also as a philosophical metaphor and navigational tool to investigate our diasporic identity as well as our intricate feelings and connections that come with it. By aligning with viewpoints from Sinophone Studies, we are able to refigure and reflect on our identities through our in-betweenness within a broader transnational context.
Pushing Hands collective is designed to be shared and contribute to St1ckyr1ce’s research on diverse Asian approaches to arts and community, collective sustainability, resilience, and rest. As a group, Pushing Hands was created to explore ways of caring for the broader collective. Through a Sinophone lens, we seek to encourage Asian communities to share their unique first-person perspectives, challenge the westernisation of Asian narratives, uncover untold stories, and deepen the understanding of the nuances and commonalities within our communities that bind us beyond nation-state borders.
How does your work comment on current social or political issues? As Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong has pointed out in his book On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, ‘Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are. To be or not to be. That is the question, yes, but not a choice.’ Model minorities have been the dominant representation of the Asian community in Western society for decades. Assimilation or integration is always a survival mechanism for Asian immigrants and Asian descendants. Even with increasing numbers of productions and reflections, the visibility of Asian people is still lacking, especially in the context of European societies. The global majorities usually fall under the catch-all term, BIPOC. The intraminority’s dynamics and relations have not been well addressed yet. Tokenisation, orientalism and ornamentalism still persist on a daily basis. It takes time and a lot of work to find an alternative and to rebuild our imagination of justice. We do not want to lose our multiplicities and ambivalences when we unite our communities. We are seeking ways to build solidarity ethically and beyond essentialisms. Our collective for us is a fallow ground for Asians and our allies in Europe to nourish a sense of belonging through artistic practice that has alternative linkages with our heritage. We hope to nurture this fallow ground through different forms of gathering and moments of rest. We are curious about practicing minor activism while having fun and fostering a space to rethink and reimagine our identities and positions in a crisis-driven world. We seek to distinctly explore an embodied approach and a genuine, deeply personal way of transforming our ideas and experiences into cultural and artistic practices while serving community connections. To open more conversations about these topics, serve as a kick-off to generate more non-western centric perspectives and reflect on the discourse of decolonisation and deimperialisation through practices that reconfigures and localises our experiences in Brussels.
