WoMen
Workshop:
A
collective history restoration of Chinese women diaspora
For whom
All female migrants and their decedents with a Chinese origin
No artistic experience needed—only a willingness to reflect, create, and share.
Why participate
From the moment we were born, they were our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. We grew accustomed to their daily dedication to family and household labor, as if it were an unquestioned given. We sometimes grew weary of their nitpicking and constant nagging. We accepted their identities as "someone's wife" or "someone's mother" in public life, and we normalized how their epitaphs reduced them to mere appendages of others. As history marched forward, they even lost their own distinct faces. We saw the outcomes of their lives but missed the journeys they endured. They too were once youthful dreamers with grand ambitions. They too were once brilliant and full of talent. They too were once individuals, not just extensions of others.
Diaspora has always been uniquely challenging for women. Prior to the 21st century, the primary path for female migration was through marriage—becoming someone’s wife, then a mother. Many spent their lives trapped in the **invisible work** of domesticity.
**WoMen** is a research and re-creation workshop centered on the family archives of diasporic women. Through reinventing these archives using skills learned from the **invisible labor** of our matriarchs, this project aims to re-narrate female migration histories and restore a recognizable face to these forgotten or overlooked women. We seek to study both the hardships they faced and the triumphs they achieved during their diasporic journeys.
Whether your matriarch—or you yourself—were a homemaker, cleaner, dishwasher, lawyer, accountant, engineer, or held any other role, their stories are invaluable threads in the tapestry of diasporic history. Their names deserve remembrance, their legacies needs to be pass on, and their experiences can guide future generations of migrant women.
Let’s co-author the first collective history of Chinese diasporic women. Let’s reclaim their voices and ensure their legacies are written into history.
自从我们出生伊始，她们便是我们的母亲，祖母，曾祖母等。我们习惯了她们日复一日地围绕着家庭，操劳着家事，似乎一切都本该如此。我们也曾有些厌烦她们的斤斤计较和喋喋不休。我们也习惯她们在人前是谁的妻子，谁的母亲，我们也习惯了她们的墓志铭上书写着是谁的附属物，甚至随着历史推进，她们失去了自己的模样。我们看到了她们人生的结果，却错过了她们人生的进程。她们曾经也是青春少艾，壮志满怀。她们曾经也才华横溢。她们曾经也仅仅是自己，而非他人的附属物。移民对女性是艰难的。在21世纪前，女性移民的途径往往只有结婚，成为他人的妻子，然后成为母亲。她们中许多终其一生被困于家庭的invisible work当中。
WoMen是一个围绕离散女性家庭照片的研究与再创作工作坊。这个项目意在通过对我们从母辈invisible work中学习到的技艺对family archive的再创造与女性移民史的再叙述，重新赋予这些被遗忘或是被忽略的女性一张recognizable face，去研究她们移民史中所遇到的困难和所达成的成就。无论您的母辈或您是家庭主妇，清洁工，洗碗工，或事律师，会计，工程师等等，她们都是移民史中的极有价值的一部分，她们的故事与名字值得被记住，她们的人生经历会为以后的女性移民提供参考价值。请加入我们，一起书写第一部中国女性移民历史，为移民史的女性发声。
What to bring
family archive of you or your female ancestors. You can email me (zyx0505@gmail.com) before the workshop.
For those who can’t be there and want to participant or contribute to my project,
you can upload your story via this link.
Participation
Free. Seats are limited, please send email to: zyx0505@gmail.com
Free. Seats are limited, please send email to: zyx0505@gmail.com
What happens during the sessions?
- Shared Circles: Participants who are from different timeframe and cultural background gather and narrate their female ancestor/their own diasporic story. Here, you might find things that you did not know about before.
- Making as Resistance and libaration: Engage in creative interventions—using a or more craft from your female ancestors, which part of the invisible work they did all their life, to create a portrait of you bring, of your own thought and your own understanding, to represent them in a rightful way, we together to amplify silenced voices and mend fragmented histories.
- Ritual for Remembrance: Together, we will make ritual together to remember our female history together.
The Artist:
Yanxian Zhao is a multidisciplinary artist rooted in the complex narratives of migration, memory, and gender. Born and raised in Toishan, Cantone—a region historically known as the epicenter of global Chinese labor diaspora—her work interrogates the silenced stories of women overshadowed by the glorified tales of male migrant laborers. Growing up amidst the echoes of her hometown’s transnational legacy, Zhao was acutely aware of the duality shaping her community: the celebrated heroism of men who ventured abroad and the resilience of women who remained, anchoring families and traditions in their absence.
This gendered dichotomy, embedded in the fabric of Chinese diaspora history, deeply informs Zhao’s practice. Her art challenges the invisibility of women’s labor and agency, weaving together personal and collective memory to reclaim their place in migratory narratives.
Zhao’s practice transcends mere documentation; it is a call to reimagine history through an intersectional and collective lens. By centering the voices of women often relegated to the margins, she constructs counter-narratives that bridge past and present.