April 3- May 1, 2021, Stomping Ground LA
Family M(e)assage (Working Title)
How do we articulate a traumatic experience when it’s inexpressible? How can we find new vocabularies for healing when language is still in crisis and complicates our experience?
Family M(e)assage (Working title) is an experiment that explores the legacy of national trauma within a family, especially how it passes down among generations through bodies and other non-verbal means. This project traces somatic connections among three generations of women in a family – the artist’s grandmother, mother, and herself – to access the muted family history around and beyond the experience of the Land Reformation and the Cultural Revolution in China between the 1950s – 1970s.
This project takes studies on transgenerational trauma and Chinese Medicine Psychology-a study on the interrelationship between body and mind rooted in ancient Chinese medicine philosophy-as theoretical supports and inspirations.
More about our 2021 Research + Development Residencies HERE
Xiaoyue’s Process:
By looking into my family activity – giving each other Chinese massage therapy – this piece explores how trauma and unexpressed emotions manifest as physical experiences like body pain, soreness and sickness. By tracing similar somatic experiences in different generations, this project is interested in exploring the possibilities of creating a new space and vocabulary to approach, understand and communicate trauma.
Every Friday evening between March to May 2021, I would be sitting next to my laptop, video calling my mother who lives on the other side of the earth in China. Through these phone calls, we shared our research findings around transgenerational trauma – more specifically around historical events that happened between the 1950s to 1970s in China, the somatic manifestation of emotions or mental disorder in Chinese Medicine theory, her childhood memories of the family, and learned history about that period from my grandparents’ narration.
About Xiaoyue Zhang:
Xiaoyue Zhang is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist and creative producer working at the intersection of performance, dance, photography, and film. She collaborates with bodies, others, and her own, to access the archived experience of tension present in identities through unlearning and relearning bodily experience with non-linguistic approaches. In her process, Xiaoyue seeks the transforming, transgressing and healing potential through birthing hybridities of mediums, disciplines, and cultures.
Xiaoyue’s theater works have been shown at REDCAT New Original Works Festival and Hollywood Fringe Festival. Her film and video works have been presented at the Guangdong Museum of Art (China) and Short Film Corner of the 2018 Cannes International Film Festival. Her film producing works have been shown internationally in France, Germany, Athens, Vietnam, Ireland. She has worked as an associate producer for Ergao Dance Group and CalArts Center for New Performance. She is currently the associate producer at The Orchard Project (New York). She received her MFA in Creative Producing and Management at California Institute of the Arts and is currently living on the Tongva Land (also known as Los Angeles).
Early April, my mother took a trip back to my grandmother’s during Qingming – a traditional memorial ritual during which families would visit their ancestors’ graveyards to clean the gravesites, pray to their ancestors and make ritual offerings. During the visit, my grandmother would join us in the video call. We would talk about everything from my grandmother’s childhood games to COVID cases in LA to what we eat for dinner while doing hour-long Chinese massages together — my mom giving acupuncture and AiJiu to my grandmother, and me cupping myself. During these calls, we were tracing our body pains together and learning about how these pains connect us across space and time.
During these calls, we were tracing our body pains together and learning about how these pains connect us across space and time.
Xiaoyue Zhang
After the trip, I started creating dialogues with the video call recordings in a studio space. I would flood the space with my mother’s and my grandmother’s voices and images of their bodies and respond to it with ovement and sound…I was curious about finding a tracing quality in movements, and incorporating massage treatment devices as they create restraint and transform my body with shapes, marks, and pain.
This has been an incredibly rewarding process both in terms of finding new artistic vocabularies and having an opportunity to connect with my family in a profound way. In sharing our experiences and observations of these new ways of us listening to and connecting with each other, we are finding healing vocabularies and potentials in navigating a national trauma through the past and into the future.
Xiaoyue Zhang
Photographs by Yue Wang
Our 2021 Research + Development Residencies were supported in part by a grant from the California Arts Council, a state arts agency. Special Thanks to Stomping Ground LA for hosting this artist-driven residency.
