Jasmine Liaw

to name language

'to name language' is an experimental dance-technology installation made up of hanging engraved acrylic and mapped video projection to recreate my Hakka-Chinese given name, Liaw Xīn Nī 廖芯妮.

“My Great-Auntie Anne gave me my Hakka-Chinese name when I was 12. My name in Hakka translates as “understanding you, trust you.” As a specific Chinese dialect, Hakka translates as "guest-peoples," as we are not named after a geographical region because we are made up of diasporic communities. Our Hakka language is rare and deeply tied to embodiment and resilience. Preserving oral histories through recorded movement, this project allows me to visualize, investigate, and expand my knowledge of our culture through the totality of my body as a material. With 'to name language,' I started by filming myself dancing in response to a recording of my Auntie and Dad discussing the translation of our names, practicing how to write them on an old newspaper together in her home. Filming myself from above, I also move in response to the gestures of their writing, the pictorial physicality of my name in Chinese characters, and the meaning of its translation. As a practice-based and intergenerational process, I am retracing my ancestry with movement.Interweaving light, acrylic, and even fishing line, I choose to work with transparent materials as a method to visualize the complexity of transcultural identity; feeling both inside and outside of culture, language, lineage, and my understanding of homeland. Thinking about the epigenetics of ancestral trauma, be-longing, and displacement, these acrylic pieces are video stills from my recordings of my movement. The recordings are then edited to reform my name in Chinese characters. I’m thinking about the topography of the diasporic body via lasering and engraving holes and textural terrain in each acrylic body. While trying to learn my Hakka language, I’m questioning what it means to receive a name and live up to it by moving and sitting with these gaps in language. Receptive to the weight of its journey to come to me, I am considering my body as a landscape and record keeper. Reconnecting with my Hakka culture as an adult in this artwork, video projection of my body fades in and out encapsulating the motion of returning. Referencing Indigenous epistemologies of cosmology, this work represents a place to reimagine myself and explore among my ancestors. I think of Felicia Gay’s words, “we breathe in the stars that have watched over us all this time.” Re-inscribing my own understanding of inter-connectedness, co-existence, and fragmented identity, I unearth this sense of kinesthetic in-betweenness through the contour of my bodies floating; as embodied light wading through the fragile form of the acrylic. ”