Wenxuan Xue
Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
Wenxuan Xue is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in Applied Theatre and Racial Justice, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Artistic Research, and ASAP/Review. Their dissertation “Ancestral Becoming” examines how contemporary Asian North American and Pacific Islander artists return to and embody ancestral rituals in respond to indenture, military, settler colonial, and neoliberal displacements. These artists simultaneously reimagine “ancestry” with queer and more-than-human kinships beyond heteronormative notion of bloodline.
As an artist–curator, Xue activates memories and senses towards queer magic, spiritual reverberation, and decolonial reckoning. Their recent exhibitions include Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams (Pao Arts Center; co-curator) and an archive and/or a repertoire (Tufts University Art Galleries; curatorial fellow). They have been developing a ritual performance becoming ancestral mud 成为泥土that stewards Shaanbei ancestral practices through oral stories, songs, papercutting, and folk dance, presented at the Orchard Project, Mobius Live Art, and We Create Festival. As an applied theatre practitioner, they work closely with Boston Chinatown social workers towards embodied practice of rest, care, and community belonging. They are a recipient of NEFA’s Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+) dissertation fellowship.
