Performance & Installation
Solar Solace
2026, Lead Artist
A performance and interactive bioplastic installation. Currently in development.
How do we connect in an increasingly alienated world? Amid climate and socio-political upheaval, this performance-activated installation explores cannibalism as a metaphor for exploitation and integration, and our collective interdependence on one another. Performers guide participants through a cycle of movement and song, transforming a central bioplastic, touch-reactive installation into a communal space for connection.
The bioplastics forming the installation—made by the artist—are biodegradable, edible, and conductive. Two pillars stand before the central piece, each holding bioplastic fragments. When participants place their hands on separate pieces and then touch one another, they complete an electrical circuit that activates and modulates the sound and visual environment. This interaction is intentionally metaphorical: like an electrical system requiring a closed loop for energy to flow, transformation here happens through connection. Holding hands, leaning on one another, coming together—these aren't symbolic gestures but the mechanisms of change in the piece.
More soon.
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Cinthia Chen: Lead Artist, Biomaterials, Installation & Video Projections Designer
Hilary Brown-Istrefi: Choreographer & Performer
Abigail Linnemeyer: Performer Collaborator
Heather N. Dutton: Performer Collaborator
Wren Stark Haven: Sound Designer & Composer
Eliza Carlise: Sound Studio Assistant
Michelle Wu: Creative Technologist & Project Assistant
The Ritual Division: Fabrication
Ashton Posey: Fabrication Production Manager
Asami Morita: Lighting Designer
Maya Simone Z.: Producing Consultant
Liz Peterson: Show Doula
Elizabeth Sun: Voiceover
Text sourced from: Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack Forbes, Little Apocolypes by Kaitlyn Teer, The Psychopomp by Annie Jin Wang
Special Thanks: Lincoln Center Performing Arts (Jordana Leigh, Maya Davis, Mengtong Guan, Monika Orzelowski), Theater Mitu, Cornell Tech (Michael Byrne, Niti Parikh, Sebastian Bidegain), Adrian Comisso, Tina Hanaé Miller, Kayla Farrish, Cameron Ringness, Annie Jin Wang, The Sewing Circle (Rasim Alam, Julia Balas, Al Balin, Andrew Benincasa, Camden Goetz, Emma Fitzgerald, Danielle Kong, Loulou von Kohl, Sibonay Koo, Carlos Jaimes Noriega, Iso Vento, Ada Westfall)
Waters_of_Oblivion.exe
Director & Multimedia designer
A multi-sensory experience brought to life with binaural sound and live video (and live cooking), Waters of Oblivion (迷魂湯) takes audiences on an immersive journey into the underworld, where Meng Po, the Lady of Forgetfulness, feeds the souls of the deceased a special brew to help them forget their previous lives before reincarnation.
The Actress Who Died a Thousand Deaths
Director & Playwright
The Actress Who Died a Thousand Deaths utilizes ‘live cinema theater’ to both recreate and reimagine moments from Anna May Wong’s films and life; to subvert type-casted and Orientalist tropes of the original and offer a ‘re-framing’ on stage.
Utopian Hotline (Planetarium)
2025, Theater Mitu company Member
Part performance, part intergalactic transmission, this performance transforms the Planetarium into a space for radical storytelling beneath the stars — where sound, science, and imagination collide. Inspired by NASA’s 1977 Voyager Golden Record and shaped by voices from our own time, Utopian Hotline invites you to listen, reflect, and envision a future worth reaching for — where real voicemails become a collective vision of tomorrow.
Presented by ArtsEmerson and the Museum of Science, this live production blends voicemail confessions, music, and full-dome visuals inside the iconic Charles Hayden Planetarium.
Bloodlines 血脉 (online)
2022, co-director w/ Sim Yan Ying
As artists hailing from a different locale in the Sinosphere, we are tracing the pathways of migration, globalization, and sociopolitical upheaval. From the words and stories of our grandparents, which crossed continents and decades to be passed onto us, we are seeking to explore the divergences and convergences in our learned history, narrative, and memory -- particularly in a time of great divisiveness and rising anti-Asian sentiment.
(holy) BLOOD
2024, Theater Mitu Company Member
Part live-scored silent film, part irreverent midnight movie– (holy) BLOOD creates an entirely original sonic landscape to accompany manipulated pieces of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult-classic film Santa Sangre. Violently shattered across screens and accompanied by explosive blood choreography, the work remaps a story of circuses, blood cults, madness, and forgiveness.
seen/unseen
2023, co-devisor
A piece conceived as an extension of Fred Wilson’s Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds installation in Columbus Park, Brooklyn. A multimedia movement performance considering the power and implications of asserting/subverting agency, the act of surveillance, and who is looking in (or who is looking out).
Utopian Hotline
2021, Theater Mitu company Member
A telephone hotline, a vinyl record, a performance.
Is anyone out there? Is anyone listening? Are we alone? In 1977, NASA launched the twin Voyager spacecrafts to try and answer these questions. Aboard both is an artifact intended to communicate who and what we are: The Golden Record. After traveling over 13 billion miles, this proverbial message in a bottle is the farthest human-made object from earth. If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?