Translation
In Translation, Tzu Tung invites audience to recite from a bilingual book they authored—one side in English, the other in Chinese. The performance reveals the emotional and epistemological dissonance between the two languages, exposing how culture becomes an object of the colonial gaze and how personal narratives are fractured by systems of translation.
Tzu Tung confronts the conditions under which culture becomes an object of the colonial gaze—whether framed through the autonomy of Western philosophical thought or embedded within the globalized circuits of art, academia, and political power. In Translation, they examine how epistemological and political injustices shape individual subjectivities, particularly those formed at the intersection of postcolonial identity and diasporic longing. The work centers on a bilingual book written and illustrated by the artist, filled with personal yet fragmented reflections expressed in both Chinese and English. During the performance, two audiences—each reading a different language on opposite sides of the same page—are guided to recite the text in unison. The resulting cacophony captures the lived tension between languages, evoking not only the disorientation of translation but also the internal conflict between the dream of Western mobility and a persistent sense of national nostalgia. Translation lays bare the affective and structural violence embedded in language politics, questioning who speaks, who is heard, and how meaning is fractured—or remade—through the act of speaking across tongues.