Pushing Hands Party 推手派對

Pushing Hands Party is an evening for the Asian community to celebrate and gather through body movement, mapping and tasting. The event hosts a dance floor for pushing hands encounters, an interactive food stand, crafts and a mapping area in the living room(bosbar).

This event shares our research process during the residency in Het Bos, and the traces of the Pushing Hands Collective in Antwerp city.

Pushing hands (推手 tuishou), is a training routine in internal Chinese martial arts following the four principles of pushing hands: 沾 (dip), 黏 (stick), 連 (connect), 隨 (follow), which feature ways of collectiveness through body contact. Two people stand face to face with their bodies grounded.

Their arms move in constant contact against/along each other, enclosing any gaps for an attack. It also exists in many different types of martial arts as a warm-up exercise and introductory training for beginners. Pushing hands practice emphasises the force of listening, allowing for defence while being in the position of a ‘follower’. It is a way for martial arts practitioners to learn how to generate, coordinate and deliver energy to each other. It teaches one to feel for intention and effectively neutralise incoming force in a safe environment.

Pushing Hands Collective 推手屯

Pushing Hands Collective 推手屯 is a branch of the broader Asian queer collective St1ckyr1ce in Brussels. The five members of the Pushing Hands Collective have worked together on multiple projects under St1ckyr1ce.
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. We have an ethnic relationship with Sinophone culture in some form; most of us can speak Mandarin as a common language and have roots in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.

It is designed to be shared and contribute to St1ckyr1ce’s research on diverse Asian approaches to arts and community, collective sustainability, care, and rest. Pushing Hands Collective was created to explore ways of caring for the broader community. The collective’s proposition is rooted in the framework of Sinophone Studies and in our common interest in creating spaces to gather people and push hands to dance music. Pushing hands comes from a contact practice that is used in martial arts as a form of warm-up, centring, and balance training. We wanted to expand the social and sensing aspects of this practice in the context of migrants living in the city.

We take pushing hands not only as a physical exercise but also as a philosophical metaphor and navigational tool to investigate nuances in our lived experience and to grasp ideas of belongingness as Asians in Europe. 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. 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.

@pushinghands.collective on Instagram @st1ckyr1ce_brussels on Instagram

sophew

sophew is a DJ and producer that explores diverse forms of dance and ambient music. They are also a performer and conceptual artist. Their sound research explores instances of collective joy and de-individuation. They are interested in the transformational qualities of sound, and its capacity for facilitating movement. sophew often works communally, particularly with those that do not necessarily consider themselves artists. They are in search of chance and exchange; living through practices grounded in a present and generous sense of place.