Na is a member of the Sino-Japanese Contemporary Performing Arts KOURYU/JIAOLIU Project, an ongoing initiative launched in 2024 that brings together theatre, dance, and performance practitioners from China and Japan. Composed of six artists and producers—three from each country—the project explores Kouryu/Jiaoliu (交流, “exchange”) through artistic collaboration and shared experience.
The collective develops this practice through shared residencies, travel, everyday life, collective creation, workshops, lectures, and performances, creating ongoing opportunities to encounter one another, work, and learn together. The project began in China in 2024 and continued in Japan in summer 2025. In summer 2026, it returned to China and was also invited to present its work at the Djakarta International Theater Platform (DITP) in Indonesia.
Our members are 坂本もも Momo Sakamoto, 萩原雄太 Yuta Hagiwara, 山本卓卓 Suguru Yamamoto, 张渊 Yuan Zhang, 王梦凡 Mengfan Wang, and 安娜 Na An.
In both Chinese (交流, jiāo liú) and Japanese (交流, kōryū), the word “exchange” conveys more than just a transactional act or the kind of “collaboration” often emphasized in international cultural programs. What we mean is closer to the literal imagery evoked by the Chinese and Japanese characters: like the confluence of flowing waters—merging, lingering, and diverging through difference, creating new currents of encounter. This notion of relationship carries a nuance that resists direct translation into English. It may only be fully understood and embodied within the specific cultural and linguistic contexts of Chinese and Japanese. In such a process of 交流, moments of discomfort and misunderstanding are inevitable—and yet, it is precisely within these spaces that an unfamiliar and previously unwritten shared language begins to take form.
Please see the links below for more details about our project (in Chinese and Japanese).
https://www.hanchuyuei2017.com/kouryuukai
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/P3pprsmBIANdPFPBLKXZVg
The Minor Dance Festival 三人微小舞蹈节 was initiated by Xiaobo Wu 吴晓波, Mengfan Wang 王梦凡, and Na in 2025. An artist-led initiative and shared practice, the festival brings the three artists’ different bodily histories into dialogue, attending to the nuances of embodied experience and the complex intersections of individual lives, collective narratives, and memory. It seeks to cultivate an alternative artistic community and explore different ways of making within China’s contemporary performance landscape.
The first gathering took place at Penghao Theater in Beijing in 2025 under the theme An Open Field of Exploration. In 2026, the artists returned for a second gathering, Intimate Witness.
The festival is entirely self-organized, from curation and artistic creation to publicity, theater coordination, and cleaning the space. Without financial or institutional support, the artists have sustained it through their own labor and the care and support of friends and audiences. In 2026, the festival also invited theatre and dance producer Zhang Cui and Xing Liang, a pioneer of modern dance in China, to join the artists in conversation.
Na maintains a long-term collaborative practice with Iranian dance artist Negar Kamali. Born in the same year—one in Iran and the other in China—they met years later in the United States as immigrants, navigating the challenges of living across different languages, cultures, and ways of expressing themselves. Their embodied practice explores womanhood, language, cultural complexity, and how memory is carried through the body and the senses.
In Unnoticed Strand, they move back and forth between their present selves and their eleven-year-old selves. The work unfolds through intimate questions about hair and its place at different stages of their lives. Their conversations become movement scores through which they revisit and embody memories.
In How Do We Practice Waiting?, they approach waiting as a lived and embodied practice, asking how it occupies the body, bends time, and claims space. They ask what it means to remain present within uncertainty.
© 2026 by Na An
