Join us from 5–7 PM on Saturday, February 24th, for a performance by Deuce Lee in conjunction with the exhibition Moving Clouds, curated by Cathy Lu. the edge of a cloud is an immersive and responsive performance in conversation with the works of Moving Clouds, featuring Melissa Lewis Wong (AKA Deuce Lee) in drag, joined by collaborator Emma Tome’s sound design and live accompaniment.

Taking inspiration from traditional Chinese opera aesthetic/face, Bruce Lee’s media and martial arts legacy, and the drag ancestry of Black & Brown queers, the edge of a cloud dances along continuums: from a blank face to a drag face; through masculinity and fluidity; between past and future. Drag spectacle emerges as seance and ritual, allowing the rules of life and death to be bent, suspended, and clouded. This sonic, transdisciplinary performance invokes an ancestral listening practice – which ancestors’ voices are spilling into our awareness? What if we looked to each other as living ancestors? To be in diaspora, to be in queerness, to be in a body is to welcome a thousand tiny deaths as we shed past versions of ourselves and grow into the future.

Melissa Lewis Wong (they/she/他) is a queer, mixed-race, Chinese American, nonbinary dance and drag artist. Their maternal Chinese lineage is the place from which they create—in conversation with queerness, mixedness, and diaspora. Their physical training comes from a background of traditional Chinese folk arts, Western modern dance, and martial arts (Jeet Kune Do, Tai Chi). Deuce explores themes of Asian American identity by flipping cultural stereotypes and tropes, painting hyperboles of gender, and challenging drag norms.