[California Iteration]

Event: Beyond the Grave, Writing Ghost

Dates: May 12, 13, 19, 20, 2023

Location: Evergreen Cemetery, Santa Cruz, California

Presented by: Museum of Art and History Santa Cruz x Indexical

[Kuala Lumpur Exhibition]

Exhibition: This Time: Contemporary Watercolours

Location: A+ WORKS of ART, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

[Manila Iteration]

Event: Ghost Calligraphy

Date: August 2021

Location: Gravity Art Space, Manila, Philippines

Ghost Calligraphy is a series of performances that merge movement, sound, and writing to explore the latent traces of history and materiality. Through gestural calligraphy and sonic transcriptions, the project examines how the act of writing can summon spectral substrates and reveal buried narratives. The performance’s California iteration took place at Evergreen Cemetery in Santa Cruz, where I engaged with the unmarked graves of 19th-century Chinese migrant workers, many of whom lived and labored in the now-erased Chinatown of Santa Cruz, California. Using a piezoelectric microphone, I translated the act of calligraphic transcription into sound, capturing the physicality of writing as a way to listen to the silenced histories of these displaced communities. The work draws on archival research, including the presence of a Chinese calligraphy of the Lord’s Prayer that once hung in a local Chinese Christian church, suggesting the ways spirituality, labor, and survival intertwined in migrant communities.

The connection to Santa Cruz is deeply personal, shaped by both childhood memories in the oldest Chinatown in the world in Santa Cruz, Manila, and the time as an MFA student in Santa Cruz, California. In Manila’s Chinatown I encountered similar layers of colonial history, migration, and systemic exclusion: histories of displacement echoing across geographies. The presence of Chinese communities in both cities, their forced removals or segregation, and the ways in which they fought for their lives, informed the process, which navigates the intersections of cultural memory, transience, and belonging. 

The performance engages with the concept of hungry ghosts in Buddhism: lingering specters of the departed who wander in search of sustenance and acknowledgment. This belief resonates with the histories of Chinese migrants in Santa Cruz, California, whose labor was rendered invisible by racial violence and systemic erasure.