LAURA 嘟嘟 DUDU

I see myself as a Kintsugi-artist. I embrace, mend, and make marks on breakages. Instead of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold as in the traditional Japanese artform, I work with ephemeral experiences and affective memories related to trauma and grief. Social pratice, animation, 16mm film, video, participatory art, food, and organizing are my forms of queering the bodies and archiving intimate narratives.

My work values the transformation of wounds and pain, ensuring the restoration process remains visible and tangible. My engagement in diaspora activism and queer feminist organizing in Japan and the U.S. informs my art, grounding recent projects in personal memories and reimagined relationships. They unfold in domestic and non-traditional art spaces like parks, gallery hallways, kitchens, nail salons, lesbian bars, shrines, local bookstores, and nightclubs. Drawing on the concepts of fugitivity from Black studies and queer feminist research, my art constructs a diaspora queer undercommons, fostering fluid yet intense kinship-making. Projects have unfolded in forms of a 100-person boxing class, a collective food-making festival, stand-up comedy, an annual desert ritual, complimentary nail services exchanged for companionship, and intercontinental letter-writing among sexual trauma survivors.

Each project extends an invitation to collectively weave personal stories into encounters and entanglements, reconnecting memories and building home. These projects foster a womb-like environment that encourages community members to practice reciprocal trust, radical care, and queer intimacy. Through the interplay of personal stories, memory, and audience interactions, my work continues to embraces uncertainties, messiness, blurs and elisions, and explore how these forms of imperfections reveal possibilities for solidarity and queer feminist resilience post-trauma. I am currently developing a stop-motion animation that sparks conversations about my queer body by sharing family memories entwined with the Chinese One-Child Policy and my mother/grandmother(s).

Laura / 嘟嘟(dudu) is a multidisciplinary queer immigrant artist born in China and based bicoastal. They is an animator, filmmaker, performer, food-maker and multifaceted creative with diaspora activist roots as a community organizer. In their practice, they sees themselves as a kintsugi artist who embraces, mends, and makes marks on and with imperfections. Instead of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold as in the traditional Japanese artform, they work with individuals' and communities’ scattered memories. Their work communicates the intersection of multiculturalism, migration, trauma, healing, queerness, and community (re)-building. Guided by the abolitionism approach and queer feminism framework, they explores the catharsis of healing, intimately documenting their personal journey while holding spaces for interpersonal-communal encounters.

Laura has been awarded the Oberlin Shansi Foundation Independent fellowship in Japan, the WCWD artist grant at Asian American Arts Alliance(NYC), the Arthur Freed Donation Fund at University of Pennsylvania(PA) and Elftmann Scholarship Award at University of California, Irvine(CA). They were also artist-in-resident for Feminist Incubator at Project For Empty Space(NJ) and BRIC Arts | Media Brooklyn(NY). Their moving-image-based work has been screened at 55th Chicago International Film Festival, North Dakota Human Rights Film Festival, Social World Film Festival and Cleveland Museum of Art. Their practice extends into the various community spaces and works with grass-roots organizations on special projects including United Empowerment Womxn based in LA and WomenStandUp in China. Currently, they serve as the co-founder of Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) collective, a community artistic project devoted to organizing and supporting social justice movements, collective healing, empowerment, and systemic change in the Chinese and Sinophone diaspora.