Opening Reception / Keynote: International Exchange Seen from the Perspective of the Stateless

[18:00 Opening Reception]

At the first edition of YPAM, we welcome all the registered participants at this opening reception. The venue is BankART KAIKO, the in-person venue of our hybrid networking program YPAM Exchange. We hope that you will also enjoy the architecture that maintains the historical memory of a silk storage in the 1920s (kaiko means silkworm).

[19:00 Keynote by Chen Tien-shi]

Born and raised in Heilongjiang and Hunan provinces, Chen Fu-Poo and Chen Chang Pa-Chung moved to Taiwan from China for their respective reasons, and after marrying in Taiwan, they moved to Yokohama in the 1950s. The Second Sino-Japanese War was one of the major causes of their exile, and upon the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China in 1972, they were asked to choose either Chinese or Japanese nationality. Since they could not accept either, they chose to be stateless. Their daughter Chen Tien-shi, who was born in Yokohama around that time, lived as a stateless person, until she obtained Japanese nationality in 2003, in Yokohama Chinatown and deepened her thought and research on identity.

For the keynote speech of the first edition of YPAM, we invited Chen Tien-shi, who currently runs a nonprofit organization “Stateless Network,” to talk about the history of Yokohama Chinatown, the concept of statelessness, its cultural and political meanings, and the importance and current status of international exchange from this perspective. This will be the first time for her to give a lecture in Japanese, Chinese and English without interpretation.

She will also be a collaborator in the research for and creation of Yang Zhen’s choreographic piece Jasmine Town, which will premiere at YPAM Direction in 2022.