Location: UCLA Northwest Campus Auditorium
In this moment of increased racialized violence, imperialist borders, and binary ideologies-queer, gender, and neuro expansive artists of the Chinese and Taiwanese diaspora, jess x. snow and treya lam offer a tender night of live poetry, music, cinema, and coalition building.
Their show will take us on a journey across time: channeling matriarchal histories of Asian American resistance, the artists' own fractured relationships with their motherlands, and the authentic ways they heal trauma and build chosen family in the present day.
The art invites us to hold out collective pain at the root, allow it to move through our bodies and back into the earth. As the systems continue to harm marginalized communities, our show will open a portal where diasporic people of all ages and genders may uncover the seed at the center of our grief and grow it into another land in the sky.
About the Artists:
Jess X. Snow (they/them/他) is a non-binary filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, poet, and thesis candidate in the directing MFA program at NYU Tisch. Spanning community-informed murals, narrative films, children's books and coming of age fiction- their body of work reimagines mental (un)wellness, intergenerational practices of care and kinship across cultures and species; and abolitionist futures. Their short films, centering the desires, disobedience and dreams of flawed Chinese migrant queers-have screened at festivals globally. Their stories have been supported by the National Film Board of Canaa, the Sundance Institute, Make Me a World/Randomhouse and residencies at the NYU A/P/A Institute, Asian American Arts Alliance, MoCADA, amongst others. Currently they are working on a coming-of-age novel and debut narrative feature about an emo Chinese immigrant artist confronting the illegal mystical force inside of her, and a narrative feature screenplay, with co-writer Alan Pelaez Lopez, exploring Black/Asian intimacies and time travel in the 19th and 20th centuries.
treya lam is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who's joyously complex identity informs but does not define their work, whether solo or when collaborating with a variety of multidisciplinary ensemble. their strident voice, politically charged songwriting and fluency on guitar, piano, and looped viola recalls Nina Simone and Andrew Bird. treya's debut Good News was created entirely by womxn and genderqueer collaborators and released via Kaki King's label. Iam is a OneBeat fellow, NYCLU Artist Ambassador and active member of the Resistance Revival Chorus. their song Dawn was featured on the RRC's debut album This Joy-released on Ani Difranco's Righteous Babe Records. Iam has performed original music at Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, the Prospect Park Bandshell and the American Museum of Natural History and opened for Ani Difranco, Valerie June and Kaki King. they are currently developing otherland-an interdisciplinary grief ritual and chamber protest album that explores grief as a catalyst for radical empathy, intersectional solidarity, and repairing our relationship to the earth.
This event is organized by the UCLA Asian Pacific Coalition and Asian American Studies Department and co-sponsored by the UCLA Asia Pacific Center.