keeping

As a guest across Asia, I was invited into acts that keep people going: marching, sharing, and communing. Through labor, ritual, and belief, the series asks what it takes to keep going. It begins and ends in Taiwan, my family’s home.

Keeping

As a guest across Asia, I was invited into acts that keep people going: marching, sharing, and communing. Through labor, ritual, and belief, this series asks what it takes to keep going. It begins and ends in Taiwan, my family’s home.

Most frames follow an invitation: living with villagers in Tetebatu, Lombok; volunteering in monasteries in Sri Lanka; marching for migrant workers’ rights in Taipei; walking the pilgrimage with Mazu, the sea deity, from Dajia. I carried brooms at monasteries, carved woodblocks with art collectives in Taipei, and lit firecrackers at Yanshui, learning their stories as I lent a hand. In many places I was the one being fed and hosted.

What is at stake for each person shows in how they turn up: freediving for abalone, hand-tapping a tattoo, and creating queer art.

The series moves from day into dark, and from labor through rest into ritual. It returns to Taiwan, where I am both returning and arriving, and ends at my 95-year-old grandmother’s dining room table in Taipei.