Performing Artist-In-Residence Program – Museum of Chinese in America

RESIDENCY DESCRIPTION

The Museum of Chinese in America’s Performing-Artist-in-Residence (PAIR) Program will invite a cohort of 3 performing artists to individually develop, create and present ONE theme-based new project, by utilizing the resources and collections at MOCA. Throughout the residency, artists will be invited to participate in artist-led workshops and give a work-in-progress presentation to the public.

PERFORMING-ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

Provide space and support for performing artists to generate a new work
Create space for organic artistic sharing and collaboration
Incubate discourse and community engagement around new ideas and artistic expression
Encourage artists to take creative risks, while nurturing a safe space for constructive feedback
Celebrate diversity in artistic expression

THEME

Implied Selves 身之所示

How do we come to understand ourselves, and how do we choose to express who we are?

The ways we present ourselves are shaped by family, culture, community, history, and the social conditions of our time. Through clothing, gesture, language, hairstyle, performance, and ritual, we communicate aspects of our identities to the world. Yet these forms of expression are never static. We inherit expectations, question them, adapt them, and sometimes reject them altogether.

Throughout history, Asian and Asian American communities have continuously negotiated the boundaries of identity and belonging through acts of self-presentation. Early Chinese immigrants cut their queues as a visible marker of political and cultural transformation. Anna May Wong challenged the racialized and exoticized expectations imposed upon Asian women. Physician Margaret Chung and filmmaker Esther Eng adopted masculine styles of dress that complicated prevailing notions of gender and sexuality. Tseng Kwong Chi’s wore the Zhongshan suit to heighten his visibility while simultaneously exposing and satirizing the ways Asian bodies were exoticized and perceived as foreign. Across generations, individuals have used appearance, gesture, and performance to assimilate, resist, survive, and imagine new possibilities for themselves.

These histories invite us to ask: What visible and invisible elements shape our sense of self? How have previous generations embraced, challenged, or transformed the identities imposed upon them? How do race, gender, sexuality, class, migration, and culture intersect in the ways we express ourselves?

This theme invites artists to investigate the broad spectrum of gender expression and self-presentation across time. How have ideas of masculinity, femininity, and gender nonconformity evolved within Asian American communities? What can we learn from historical examples of conformity, resistance, and transformation? And what new possibilities for selfhood might emerge in the future?

MOCA’s Performing Artist-in-Residence (PAIR) program encourages artists to engage deeply with our archives and collections as living materials. Through research and creative inquiry, we ask: How do these lived experiences continue to shape who we are today? And how might they guide the futures we are moving toward?

This program was made possible in part with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

2026 – 2027 RESIDENT ARTISTS

HAN CHEN

A fearless performer with seemingly limitless imagination and possessed with uncanny energy, GRAMMY Award-nominated pianist Han Chen brings a Romantic sensibility to his interpretations of scores old and new. Alex Ross, who selected Mr. Chen’s Naxos disc of the Ligeti Études and Capriccios as a “Notable Classical Recording of 2023,” wrote: “The Taiwanese pianist Han Chen, a noted interpreter of the Ligeti Études and other modernist repertory, has made a blistering album of the [Liszt] opera transcriptions.” (The New Yorker, September 4, 2023) Mr. Chen’s musical vision is manifest in his five solo Naxos albums, focusing on Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Thomas Adès, and György Ligeti. Mr. Chen has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic String Quartet, Calgary Philharmonic, Lansing Symphony, Fort Worth Symphony, Lexington Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, and China Symphony Orchestra.

JAYDEN LIU

Jayden Liu / Chun-Hao Liu (b. Taichung, Taiwan) is a multidisciplinary sculptor and performance artist whose practice investigates fractured identities, dispersed forms of power, and the prescribed scripts embedded within institutional systems. Originally trained in theater performance and design, Liu received his BA from National Taiwan University and subsequently worked as a theater actor in Taiwan, performing at venues such as the Experimental Theater at the National Theater. He holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York. Weaving together his background in theatrical choreography with contemporary sculpture, Liu examines how modern structures shape human behavior, language, and resistance, transforming bureaucratic loops into stylized spaces of critical inquiry.

VALKYRIE YAO

Valkyrie Yao is an artist, choreographer, and researcher working across performance, moving image, installation, and media studies. Her practice engages ritual, material culture, cultural transmission, and the relations among bodies, images, objects, and institutions. Her work has been presented at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Gibney, and the Florence Biennale, among other international contexts. Yao is a 2026–27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a 2026–27 Performing Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Chinese in America. Her work has received support from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Laundromat Project. She is a member of APAP’s 2027 Emerging Leadership Institute cohort and a 2026 CIPA × ISPA Congress Fellow. Yao is Founder and Executive Director of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus and Founding Editor of STRATUM Journal of Art, Culture, and the Humanities.

2025 – 2026 RESIDENT PERFORMING ARTISTS

Theme: Declaration of Independence 獨立宣言

What does it mean to declare independence—not just from nations, but from expectations, erasure, silence, and imposed identities? In a country built upon a founding declaration, what new declarations are necessary today?

For the 2025 Performing Artist Residency, MOCA invites artists to critically and creatively explore the theme Declaration of Independence. We welcome proposals that interrogate what it means to be “American,” to seek self-determination, or to stake a claim to visibility, freedom, and belonging—especially within diasporic, immigrant, and historically marginalized communities.

If you were to write a manifesto for your work, what would it sound like? What would it feel like? What are you declaring independence from—family, society, artistic tradition, the industry itself?

: Fortune Cookie

: Yu-wei Heath-Hsiao

: Shuning Huang

2024 – 2025 RESIDENT PERFORMING ARTISTS

Theme: Heteroglossia 眾聲喧嘩

Since the 1980s, publications like A. Magazine, Giant Robot, Yolk and Hyphen have attempted to (re)define Asian American identity and to capture diverse lifestyles shared by Asian American communities. What is the narrative that you’ll build if given the editorial power of a publication (think beyond print and more performing arts)? What lifestyle or culture would you try to capture? In the age of digital, tribalized society, what is it about you that you’d want to represent/create?

: Min Ding

: Shnya Lin

: Tidtaya Sinutoke

: Yibin Wang

: Yasmina Yuexi

2023 – 2024 RESIDENT PERFORMING ARTISTS

Theme: The Past in the Present 過去的現在式

How do our past and tradition shape who we are and how we artistically express ourselves today? What is the legacy that you are carrying on, and how? MOCA encourages applicant artists to reflect upon their roots, the past and the tradition through your five senses to create a project that speaks to who we are today.

: Maria Camia

: Ben Chin, aka saxofshaolin

: Shu-Ying Chung

: Nancy Ma