East Wind explores the Sino diasporic experience by reimagining the traditional Chinese lion dance within a virtual environment. Through motion-capture technology, performers manipulate digital lion avatars, bringing the dance into a new, augmented reality space. The work is named after The East Wind Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that has been teaching lion dance to Chinatown youth for over four decades.

The artist has said of this work ‘someone once described diaspora to me as like sensing a missing limb—reaching out for a place that no longer exists. East Wind engages with this feeling, seeking to reinhabit the Sino diasporic divide by translating the lion dance into digital form’. The project features motion-captured performances by young Chinese American members of The East Wind Foundation, capturing their mastery of a tradition that has been passed down through generations of immigrants. In the editing of the work, we first see the performers in the studio suiting up and being calibrated for the augmented reality and motion-capture cameras. They begin moving while the digital skins attach to them and trace their movements. In time, the real background is shrunk, and the performers actual bodies disappear, revealing a side-by-side comparison of the unfettered reality of the works’ making and the digital dragons as they are rendered. Eventually, all semblance of reality is gone as the skins and environments transform into a holistic, immersive environment. The work retains its link to history and the performance of the human body, while easing the viewer into a new visual paradigm, unlimited in its vision for the dance. History and tradition, seamlessly embracing technology and the future in a processual manner.

For the artist, this work reflects a vital evolution of Chinese dance traditions through the embodied movements, shaped by American life over the past fifty years. The continued practice of lion dance within these communities offers an essential way for Chinese Americans to reconnect with their cultural heritage. By virtualizing these performances, the piece not only preserves but also reimagines cultural identity for the digital era, opening new ways to document, amplify, and reinterpret tradition.