Refugee Experience (2017)
This work is about a journey of refugees interpreted as an Asian foreigner in United States. It is inspired by a “refugee experience”, an event offered to volunteering teachers at the summer arts camp open to children of refugee families at Clarkston, Georgia. This event educated the teachers for a better understanding of those children and their family. During the program, I was told to write the things and people that are most valuable to me on sticky notes including my family members and my belongings. While listening to the various stories of refugees in the town, I threw some of them on the floor by my choice or the third person’s. While traveling from one’s country to another, most refugees experience losing their valuables. Either they choose what to give up or are forced to leave them. It is a traumatic memory for refugees and feelings of their loss are diverse including grief and anger. Through this simple activity in Georgia, I had strong empathy and had a variety of feelings such as sadness, hopeless, and furiness due to action of tearing down the pieces of the notes. I have developed this activity of experiencing horrifying refugees’ journey who lost their property and the loved family and recreated the scene on stage. I dance with the sticky notes on my body which are written as my valuable things and people. While moving my body and rigorously traveling through space, the sticky notes fall down on the floor. The action of the notes falling away from the body signifies the experience of the loss of refugees. The performer expresses how it feels and also how to refrain from losing the notes at the moment as if those are real people and property. The sounds of the stormy sea and the ambience of a refugee camp help to engage the refugee’s journey with the performer. This work is not just about sharing my personal emotions about the issue of refugees, but it also hopefully shifts prejudice of refugees by providing a virtual experience of the refugees’ sorrowful situation leaving behind their usual life and the survival at a new environment.
This work is about a journey of refugees interpreted as an Asian foreigner in United States. It is inspired by a “refugee experience”, an event offered to volunteering teachers at the summer arts camp open to children of refugee families at Clarkston, Georgia. This event educated the teachers for a better understanding of those children and their family. During the program, I was told to write the things and people that are most valuable to me on sticky notes including my family members and my belongings. While listening to the various stories of refugees in the town, I threw some of them on the floor by my choice or the third person’s. While traveling from one’s country to another, most refugees experience losing their valuables. Either they choose what to give up or are forced to leave them. It is a traumatic memory for refugees and feelings of their loss are diverse including grief and anger. Through this simple activity in Georgia, I had strong empathy and had a variety of feelings such as sadness, hopeless, and furiness due to action of tearing down the pieces of the notes. I have developed this activity of experiencing horrifying refugees’ journey who lost their property and the loved family and recreated the scene on stage. I dance with the sticky notes on my body which are written as my valuable things and people. While moving my body and rigorously traveling through space, the sticky notes fall down on the floor. The action of the notes falling away from the body signifies the experience of the loss of refugees. The performer expresses how it feels and also how to refrain from losing the notes at the moment as if those are real people and property. The sounds of the stormy sea and the ambience of a refugee camp help to engage the refugee’s journey with the performer. This work is not just about sharing my personal emotions about the issue of refugees, but it also hopefully shifts prejudice of refugees by providing a virtual experience of the refugees’ sorrowful situation leaving behind their usual life and the survival at a new environment.