Archipelagic Worlding: Collaborative Performance Art Practices Across Asian Island Cities

This paper examines collaborations between performance artists working across archipelagic cities in Asia – Taipei, Tokyo, Cebu, Kaohsiung, and Ishigaki – foregrounding how these inter-island artistic exchanges reconfigure places, histories, and subjectivities. Focusing on two recent collaborative works, Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains (2025) by Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) and Nanako Matsumoto, and Bathing in the Currents (2023) by Russ Ligtas and Szu-Ni Wen, the paper examines how performance art operates as a medium of ecological reworlding and geographical reimagining across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
Both Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains and Bathing in Currents engage with the materiality of island lifeworlds – water, shorelines, forests, mountains – while challenging (neo)colonial transformations of island cities into sites of manufacturing and militarisation and island subjectivities into compliant national subjects. Both works, moreover, were developed in multiple locations, involving diverse communities and digital and archival layers that challenge notions of authorship and bounded locality. Activating shared ancestral narratives and queer methodologies, the artists explore the complexities of war, ecological crises, and indigeneity through performative encounters between water, land, and body. In these archipelagic contexts, performance facilitates a mode of inter-island thinking that relies on collaborative cross-cultural artistic practices to reinterpret the histories and futures of Asia’s island cities.