Rooted in my personal experience of constantly moving across cities and continents, Leaving As A Way Of Living is an ongoing series of curated, site-responsive performances exploring 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 wanted to create a space where those stories could be felt, witnessed, and shared.

Set in New York City, a place built on migration and reinvention, the project unfolded across public transit spaces such as subways, parks, and train stations. These are everyday sites 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 responded to its surroundings, turning fleeting moments into opportunities for reflection, intimacy, and connection.

The project brought 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 contributed a unique voice to a collective meditation on the act of leaving. Together, they explored 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 invited softness, slowness, and sensitivity to impermanence, offering a temporary, collective space for meaning to emerge through action. Bang explored the invisible weight of emotional burdens through silent gestures; Jeong created a portable device for intimate exchanges on departure; Sun and Li embodied the anxiety and uncertainty of resettling in a subway duet; and Wang traced memory and connection through poetry writing.

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.