Tickets: $17 (use code SLASHFANS for discounted $13 tickets)
Saturday, April 27, 2024 | 7pm | Click here to purchase tickets
Sunday, April 28, 2024 | 5pm | Click here to purchase tickets

Advance prices include ticketing fees. Request your member DICE Code here.

GHOST__WORLD: a performance for 4 dancers, begins with choreography built out of firsthand interviews with electronics and e-waste workers in South China. From there, a jumble of references come together in this dance piece that considers life as a ghost trapped in a phone. But who is the ghost? Is it an invisibilized electronics worker in China - or their sisters, unlicensed street vendors driven by economic desperation to dress up as large inflatable frogs, the faceless social media sensation of 2023? Is she the target of anti-Asian violence in America, turned into a blurry jpeg smudge in a storm of media spectacle? This piece considers fragmented lives in digital purgatory, living on the border between a real body and light dancing on the screen of a phone.

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, performance, and biomaterial, on diasporic Asian identities, postcolonial economies, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. In her most recent work, she’s used genetic engineering and dark encryption to reframe firsthand accounts of electronics workers, and created semi-speculative scripts from corporate brochures and industrial manuals.

Dancers: Tracey Lindsey Chan, SanSan Kwan, Miche Wong, Aine Dorman

AR and projection mapping: Espii Studios

Jen Liu’s GHOST_WORLD: a performance for 4 dancers is a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission organized by / (Slash) and co-presented with The Lab in San Francisco. The production was made with further support from Creative Capital, Gray Area, UC Berkeley Center for New Media, and the UC Berkeley Art Practice Department. GHOST__WORLD: a performance for 4 dancers will premiere on the occasion of Jen Liu: GHOST__WORLD, a related solo exhibition curated by Tanya Zimbardo, on view from April 13 through August 24, 2024 at the nonprofit arts organization / (Slash) in San Francisco.

Jen Liu will join GHOST__WORLD exhibition curator Tanya Zimbardo in conversation following the approximately half-hour performances. April 27 will include guest speaker Cathy Park Hong, writer and professor at UC Berkeley, and on April 28, guest speaker Vanessa Chang, director of programs, Leonardo / ISAST.

Thanks to: Cora Cliburn, Mia Cheong, Corey Chan, Kat G Cole, Alex Huang, Edgar Garcia, Kimi Okada, Dena Beard, Việt Lê, Shisanwu, Lenora Lee, Megan Lowe, and / (Slash) team of Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen, Efe Özmen, Ana İpek Saygı, and Maxine Schoefer-Wulf.

Please find The Lab's accessibility information here. For inquiries about accessibility or to request an accommodation, please email thelabsf@thelab.org by April 21, 2024.