Tender archives and the closeness of Cheryl Sim'sThe Thomas Wang Project
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4516936 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olivia Michiko Gagnon (University of British Columbia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-25 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Women & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0740770x.2021.1985269 |
| OpenAlex | W4200621034 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
In this article, I spend time with Cheryl Sim’s multimedia artwork The Thomas Wang Project (2015), which incorporates performance, installation, original sound recordings, and a variety of familial, documentary, and cinematic archival materials in order to explore her great-uncle’s life and death in the context of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Performing an intimate archival encounter as a form of tender touching across time and space, Sim works through collaborative practices of kinship and modes of communion in order to imagine other ways of staying in touch with absences and presences across time. Ultimately, I argue that The Thomas Wang Project is a potent minoritarian performance of closeness––one that articulates feminist forms of historical work, which both center vulnerability and refuse epistemological mastery in favor of an ethics of unknowability
Aesthetics · Art · Closeness · Kinship · Linguistics · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
After the Party
The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities
The Skin of the Film
Performance Remains
Social Work and Foster Care
Ghostly Matters
Sharing the World
Feeling Down(town Julie Brown)
Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance
Afro-Fabulations
Beside You in Time
Undoing Gender
“Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That”
Tender Research
Haptic Tactic
The Archive and the Repertoire
An Archive of Feelings
Raising the Dead
Getting Medieval
Touching Feeling
Unthinking MasteryDehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements
Close but not Deep
Ten theses on touch, or, writing touch
Introduction
Between Theater and Anthropology
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Venus in Two Acts
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |