Building upon field studies conducted with Southeast Asian migrant workers and new immigrants, 2023-2024 NTT artist-in-residence CHEN Wu-kang explores the diasporic feelings, displaced nostalgia, and loss of rituals and customs they face when confronted with upheavals and bereavement. Echoing his family story, Wu-kang creates Dance a Dance to Remember, a study on the universality of facing death and emotions, detailed through images, objects, and oral narration.

Afar from home, CHEN Wu-kang collaborated with the choreographer Eliot Feld in New York dance circle for a decade, and with the Thai contemporary dance master Pichet Klunchun led him to experience the impact of being among different cultures and languages cross Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Indonesia. In collecting his own family stories and reflecting migrant workers’ stories, peeking in the treasure box of memory, Wu-kang asks: what can we learn and cherish when those who have lived and died gather?