Performing Dictionary 1 is a live performance of speech and spoken word based on artist Chaney Manshu Diao's individual identity. In times of the social and political upheaval, Chaney's work explores individual identity through its inseparable relation to the awareness of a collective and cultural inherence which nobody can escape.

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Performing Dictionary 1 contextualises the artist's body as a mobilised site for cross-cultural encounters, within which the recognition of the self questions the borderline between a sense of belongings and otherness. Chaney's practice in addressing identity through the lens of transcultural context is informed by feminist methodologies, more specifically the locational feminism and feminist geography. The use of the language is deliberately constructed to a minimal form of citing words, as if performing the dictionary, as way of demonstrating a linguistic vulnerability in relation to grouping.