to name language (in the hard place): An Ongoing Performance-as-Research
Thursday, February 19th, 2026 | 6:30 – 8PM
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2025 Media Arts Prize Finalist Jasmine Liaw presents a performance-as-research, expanding her experimental dance technology installation, to name language. As a breathing recorder, her body attempts to translate the embedded memory of 32 pieces of engraved acrylic. These fragments resemble recordings of her learning and moving through the totality of her Hakka-Chinese given name, Liaw Xīn Nī 廖芯妮.
Combining recent durational performance research from her residency at AADK Spain (in the salt mines of Salinas del Curro), this performance-as-research navigates the hard place within the body, imprinting between what is physical and the difficult, unravelling of inter-heritage. This project uses duration as a mode of arrival, where Liaw layers light and transparency as projected recordings; slowly sitting with the gaps of her Hakka language: embodied, displaced, and tender, and her Hakka name: in practice.
About the Artist
Jasmine Liaw is an interdisciplinary artist, director, and designer in contemporary dance performance, new media art, and experimental film. With distinction, she holds a BFA (Honours) in Integrated Media from OCAD University and a Diploma Certificate from Conteur Dance Academy. Evidenced in collaboration and community, her work leans into the complexities of transcultural narratives intersecting her Hakka diaspora, and queer theories in temporality and ecology. Retracing oral histories and heritage, she chooses to create relationships between the moving body and new media to unravel auto-ethnographic research and challenge entrenched methods of production.
She is deeply grateful to have presented her work and collaborated with artists both locally and internationally. Between 2023-2025, select presentations include Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, The Asian Arts & Culture Trust with Holt Renfrew, InterAccess's Vector Festival, United Contemporary, Northwest Film Forum, Gallery 44, Pleasure Dome, Images Festival, RT Collective and more. With F-O-R-M Recorded Movement Society’s Technology & Interaction Program, she completed a two-year research exhibition project as their inaugural artist-in-residence. She has also participated in residencies with Toronto Dance Theatre and CanAsian, Canadian Dance Assembly in partnership with Dance Works Toronto, Public Visualization Lab in collaboration with Duplex Artists Society and Shoes Off Collective. This summer, she will expand her research in durational performance and eco-somatics at AADK Spain, curated and facilitated by Dr. Raegan Truax. In April 2025, she published her first research paper in time displacement and dance-technology with Kronoscope: Journal for the Study of Time, led by Emily DiCarlo. Liaw is a recipient of the 2023 Emerging Digital Artists Award presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video for her experimental film work, xīn nī 廖芯妮.
About the Media Arts Prize
Since 1990, the InterAccess Media Arts Prize has been granted annually to a graduating student whose work exhibits excellence and innovation in new media practice. Nominations are adjudicated by InterAccess's Programming Committee, who select a prize winner to be awarded a solo exhibition opportunity, a complimentary one-year studio membership, and professional development and mentorship. Finalists receive a complimentary one-year studio membership to InterAccess and an opportunity for a public artist program.
Image courtesy of Laura Turpin, taken during ON DURATION, curated by Raegan Truax, as part of 2025 Summer Residency organized by AADK.