Thank you all so much for coming tonight.

Thank you, Andrew Smith.  We discussed our plans and ideas for more than a year.  I have seen a part of Andrew’s work to collect funding to make this place work, so much work.  Thank you for the journey we have taken and for trusting me to make this project happen.  It’s been 41 years since The Lab was founded, and almost 30 years since The Lab moved to this building, one of the first steel buildings in SF as we can see here.

I have great respect to people who work sometimes in the background and support artists, to make events possible.  Here at The Lab, it’s Anthony Russell and Mick Goldwater.  Sometimes, I would stick around here after events because I wanted to see a part of their work.  It was also a moment when this event space turns into simply a space that is managed by people with care and time.  When I asked architect Kazuaki Seki where he thinks hands might be in a building because I thought about building as a body, he said maybe the entrance and windows are hands.  We have been welcomed to this place from that entrance many times and in this space with hands and arms being opened.

I am thankful to the detailed work, support and care by Anthony, Agnes Widbom, Isaac Vazquez Avila, Natalie Jenkins, and Migle Kanapelkaite.  Migle is also the person who made the glass door and the green room wall in the backroom together with Anthony and also a community maker at Deadend Vintage.

I am happy today that I will welcome Jacob Felix-Heule to perform with me. I saw Jacob at Other Minds Festival, doing sounds, at Cal Performances and other places supporting artists and organizing events.

Could you all help me thank and congratulate Andrew, Anthony, Mick, and these people who are contributing to the arts and community-making?

Through performances during this one month, I focused on beings. And, with my first collaborator Ava Koohbor, we transformed our poems, a healing process.  With Kanoko Nishi-Smith and Hyeyung Sol Yoon, we took different approaches to a scar, with Kanoko, about social work and humans’ conflicts, attending to a scar, taking off adhesive tapes, and with Hyeyung, about stories in bodies, putting the tapes or bandages on.

Human body and scar were somethings I started to think about when I looked at old pipes in the holes and stains on the floor.  They all showed me histories of the changes made to this building for people to use this space, without throwing this body away, allowing its shape to change.  And, when I looked at Anthony’s wall mending work in the backroom, putting plasters, mixtures of fibers on, I saw these histories of people’s hands as doing surgeries.

If you see plasters in the center of the installation, that is how a surgeon laid out my things out of my body after a surgery, in a spiral shape, for his medical report.  A spiral shape also reminds me of cochlea inside ears, and sensing.

Silk, for me had been about my mother’s hands folding kimono and about my grandfather in the mulberry city and nothing else, until three years ago, when I performed in my mother’s silk kimono underwear with a huge parachute of the Italian army as a silkworm.

I started to see the complexity and complicity behind silk, and started to cast the life or endurance of silkworms, with my great grandmother’s.

At the very initial phase of this project, in April or May last year, I talked to Andrew that physical things do not last, and that’s what I indeed saw at my maternal family house before saying good bye to it.  We can’t take any physical things with us.  But, somethings sometimes last without us knowing so much about them, without us being able to touch them. Something in the belly as Liam said.

Belly.

In. In. Inside.

A hole, in a hole in a hole in a hole

that runs eternally.

An eye.

I look.

Leaking. Hiding. Running. Run.

Poison. Glass, breaking.

Outside. In.

Breathing is what Hyeyung and I did through our performance and process. 

Talking about scar and injury, Hyeyung shared with me about her father’s work-related injury through dry cleaning services.

Cleaning. Messiness.

Clean and high-quality service was what unions aimed for.  It is written in San Francisco Planning Commission Resolution that the Labor Temple has been “a place where workers could help each other understand the world through working eyes, with a working sensibility.” 1915.  Labor Temple, this building, opened, excluding Asians’ work from the unions’ working sensibility.

In my working sensibility, as a performer, I started to think about my own injuries how to perform regardless.  And that is why I started to draw shapes.  I would learn how my shapes are connected with my family’s stories.  The devil mask was not only my homework but also my disobedience with care. 

In our community, my shapes changed, as I walked through lines and dots, collective walking, collective hands, collective care, collective love.

These are hopeful kindness.  I am a proud Bay Area artist.

his body was shaking constantly

that was his disobedience

to the quietness

to the emptiness

to the loneliness

to the aching

he showed me 

his round eyes

as if he showed himself to me

for the first time

across his glasses

he needed to convey

to me

about fragile kindness, asago, morning glory

but, it destroyed you. it destroyed your mother

and yet,

he wants me to be

the fragile kindness

how many times,

have I stepped on it

how many times,

have people stepped on it

but inside, I know

I won’t resist it, because you gave it to me

so, if I step on asago, I step on myself

Fragile kindness is shared beneath mud, beneath nakedness, beneath a wall of a dark room, beneath pain, beneath nowhere. And so, people want to cover it, seal it, throw it away, for brightness, for surfaces, for cohesiveness.

But when it is shared with hope, somewhere between the lines, between the comprehensive, we lift up our fragile lines, just a little bit, and the lines sway and become folds.

folds.

November 9 2024, the night of the election

it's a few days after the new moon

40 years after the full moon

120 years before the half moon

***

A few weeks after the closing of the project, I was talking with scholar and artist Fumi Okiji. Through our talk, I realized "fragile kindness" may be my everything and my core, and I don't need to transform it to anything else. The word my father used, kabosoi, can mean very weak, but I somehow translated it as fragile. And then, if we look at the term fragile, it comes from a Latin word, to break, and yet, fragility is not broken yet. In my imagination, it may be painted as a pale color, and it is not an easily chosen straightforward color but created through multiple processes. It may be stepped upon, but it can never be erased or undone, can it? This is where I am at. August 4 2025.