Leaving As A Way Of Living: Farewell
Join us for the culminating event of Leaving As A Way Of Living, a site-responsive performance project unfolding across New York City’s public and transit spaces. Rooted in personal experiences of relocation, this final gathering brings together documentation from five artists’ interventions: moments of departure shaped by migration, memory, alienation, emotion, and transformation. Through quiet gestures and embodied reflections on each artist’s personal experiences, this event offers an intimate look at how leaving can become a way of living.
The night will feature screenings of performances, conversation, and a poetry reading. Marking not a conclusion, but a shared ritual of pause, transition, and continued movement.
Participating artists: Hannah Bang, YeonJong Jeong, Luyan Li, Yang Su, and Ching-Wei Wang (Way)
Curated by Ping Ho
Event Details:
Location: Accent Sisters (89 5th Ave #702, New York, NY 10002)
Time: Friday, July 11th 6:30–8:30pm
Please RSVP at: https://lu.ma/d1eokpbw
This event is free & open to the public
Event Rundown:
6:30 - 6:40 Check In
6:40 - 6:50 Intro
6:50 - 7:30 Screenings
7:40 - 8:10 Poetry Reading by Way
8:10 - 8:30 Conversation
Leaving As A Way of Living
A curated performance-itinerant exhibition and collective action & reflection on departure
Curatorial Statement
Rooted in my personal experience of constantly moving across cities and continents, Leaving As A Way Of Living is a series of curated, itinerant performances that explore the emotional and physical dimensions of departure. I’ve met many people who, like me, carry stories of migration, transformation, and quiet goodbyes, and I want to create a space where these stories can be felt, witnessed, and shared.
Set in New York City, a place built on migration and reinvention. The project unfolds across public transit spaces such as subways, parks, ferry docks, bus stops, and airports. These are everyday spaces of passage, where departure is embedded in the flow of life and where people briefly intersect before continuing on their way. Each site-specific performance will respond to its surroundings, turning fleeting moments into opportunities for reflection, intimacy, and connection.
The project brings together artists who, like myself, are navigating ideas of home, belonging, and becoming. Whether shaped by migration, loss, distance, or the uncertainty of what comes next, each artist contributes a unique voice to a collective meditation on the act of leaving. Together, they explore different layers of departure, from the unraveling of relationships and shifting identities to emotional thresholds and experiences of displacement over time.
Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, each performance invites softness, slowness, and sensitivity to impermanence to offer a temporary, collective space for meaning to emerge through action, with Bang exploring the invisible weight of emotional burdens through silent gestures; a portable device from Jeong inviting intimate exchanges on departure; Sun and Li embodying the anxiety and uncertainty of resettling in a subway duet; Tran examining the commodification of farewells through a conceptual service; and a poetic, time-based hand-off by Wang tracing memory and connection.
Leaving As A Way Of Living is a constellation of gestures, questions, and shared presence as well as my way of saying a proper goodbye to a city that taught me to be both tough and tender—a place that became home precisely because it holds space for so many leaving and arriving, over and over again, until the next time.
Artists Interventions
Hannah Bang
What is Burden? is a silent, gesture-based performance that explores the invisible weight of emotional burdens. Through carrying, shrinking, and absorbing movements in public space, Bang reveals the quiet responsibility of confronting what is unspoken. By making these hidden weights visible, she suggests they can be transformed and released, inviting viewers to reflect on how we hold and ultimately let go of the marks life leaves on us.
YeonJong Jeong
Jeong’s Emotion Craft is a portable device designed for quiet encounters in transit spaces. It invites passersby to exchange thoughts and feelings about relocation, departure, and arrival, transforming emotion into currency through conversation. Each interaction becomes a small, intimate transaction about the experience of leaving.
Yang Sun & Luyan Li
A choreographed duet performed on subway cars and platforms, Sun and Li express the uncertainty, anxiety, and frustration of trying to settle in a city of migrants. The choice of the subway, with its constant shake, jolt, and wait, mirrors the unsettled mental state of drifters like us. No matter what decisions we make, the subway keeps departing.
Ching-Wei Wang (Way)
A poetry reading of six poems written between 2023 and 2025, mostly drafted and edited on the L train during commutes in New York. An untitled project tracing Ho’s curatorial theme of departure, transit, and exchange. It involves the anonymous circulation of a watch, passed from person to person with minimal contact, at the quiet risk that it may never return from its journey.
Full project descriptions and bios: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SR-EB04cfEDAsJ6hM7SEyqmTEecx6LTZ/view?usp=sharing