Voice, Function, and Resistance across Bodies 

Yi Qian Chan, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Through a performance presentation, I will share my puzzling experiences while living in Japan: an unexpected resistance to learning Japanese, a malfunctioning womb, and inexplicable crying fits. In these moments, I often thought of my late grandmother, a survivor of WWII in Singapore, wondering if she is attempting to speak through me. I hypothesise that I am experiencing intergenerational trauma. My research mode, rooted in lived experience and oral histories, is considered “soft evidence” within scientific discourse, and my work seeks to question the authority that demands proof of the intangible.

This work will be the third of a series developed in Japan. The first was a performance presentation reflecting on Voice, Function and Resistance in the Body, spoken to a Japanese-speaking university class in English with Japanese translations. The second shaped this inquiry into an installation from body to bodies, where I responded to handwritten audience comments, and showed select objects such as a found sake cup and my unconsumed medicine collection. Authorship is decentralised and materially mediated; drawing from Object-Oriented Ontology, objects carry withdrawn histories that speak beyond human intention.

In this new performance to be realised in Singapore, the site of my grandmother’s survival, I address her directly in fragments of languages she spoke that I don’t and vice versa. I will tell her about what has happened in Japan, also questioning my authority to speak about her. The work plays with the authority of voice across time, space and language, positioning performance as embodied, activated research.

Chan Yi Qian is a Singaporean artist working across accessibility and language to invite alternative ways of being with the world. Using multilingual and multisensory forms as both subject and method, her practice has informed publications in ASAP/Journal (2023) and DOKYU@Shodoshima (2026). She approaches accessibility not as accommodation but as creative methodology, with her research presented at CICA New Media Art Conference (2026), NUS Asia Research Institute’s Environmental Humanities symposia (2022/2023) and exhibited internationally at events such as International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (2024). She is currently a Master’s candidate in Intermedia Art and Science at Waseda University.