Crazy American​

with printmaking & design by Kaya Wurtzel

​

crazy (adj.) from 16th century English: ‘full of cracks.’

​

Crazy American is a solo embodied exploration of my mother’s family migration history from South China to the Philippines to the US, and how it places me and my family within structures of US imperialism, racial hierarchies, and Chineseness itself. Grounded in ethnographic, historical, theoretical, spiritual and embodied research, it examines the intimate ways these structures play out at the level of the body, and imagines new possibilities for moving through systems and stories of power. Crazy American dances through my relationship to the histories I can only touch, not grasp; the legacies I can only inherit, not choose; the water that pours into me, but whose flow remains uncharted.

​

Crazy American encompasses a still unfolding performative universe and research process, as I deepen into the ongoing work of metabolizing the afterlives of US empire in my lineage, and connecting with my ancestors and Chineseness.

​

​