Alumni Profile: Laura Dudu ‘18
This week we are thrilled to feature Laura Dudu ‘18, who was an Independent Fellow in Tokyo, Japan from 2018-2020. Join us in catching up with Laura as they share their experience working at Taktopia, an educational institution focused on education access and collaboration between Japan and South and Southeast Asia. While in Japan, Laura crafted their art practice, exhibited their work in galleries, and built foundations for the rest of their career. Currently, Laura is the co-founder and co-director of Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) collective, whose work has recently been featured across the US, including New York, California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. To learn more about Laura’s work, please visit www.lauradudu.com, or www.caocollective.com for information about the CAO Collective .
Laura at their exhibition in Koenji, Tokyo.
Since your fellowship ended in 2020, what have you been up to? Tell us more about the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) collective.
After summer 2020, I stayed in Tokyo until the end of the year, gradually shifting more of my organizing/activism work from in-person to online spaces. In 2021, I returned to China and helped organize and document spaces for “rejected-knowledge,” which are not institutionalized and often anti-mainstream storytelling. After living in Chengdu, Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Beijing, and Philadelphia, I’m now living in Los Angeles and New York City.
These projects explored how knowledge is kept, made, and passed on. I explored human relationships through rituals and “superstitions” (迷信 mixin), and examined food as a cultural symbol of consumption, ultimately framing these as mediums for activism and community engagement. I began to imagine how our social narratives could reject binaries of violence and embrace and instead embrace care and inclusivity. How would such a shift change the way we relate to each other? What would our world look like?
In 2022, drawing on my experience building in-person communities in Japan and organizing with online artist groups, I co-founded “CAO” (Chinese Artists and Organizers) collective with my organizing partner and codirector, Huiyin Zhou, and collective members Yanki Kung and Fran Yu. CAO creates art to empower relational community healing, making space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and marginalized experiences. Our interdisciplinary work interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, photography, sound, video, children’s games, meditation, herbal medicine, and installation. Our art investigates systems of capitalist extraction and censorship, while reimagining memory, ritual, and queer kinship to rebuild sustainable community infrastructures. Since our founding, we have worked with over 1000 community members on over 50 public performances and workshops both in person and online.
Chinese Artists and Organizers collective featured in BRIClab’s residency show to hold a we, 2022.
Outside my work with CAO, I ground my artmaking at the intersection of personal memory, family archives, ancestral knowledge, and community organizing. My recent project centers Bardo, a Tibetan Buddhist teaching describing the liminal state between death and rebirth. I used VHS footage and poetry sourced from transnational community gatherings to invite conversations around concepts of home in relation to queer kinship. I also work as a duo with Huiyin Zhou, exploring the idea of “intimacy” through image-making, moving images, conversation, and letter-writing.
How did your time at Taktopia influence your current work and career?
Taktopia is an organization with a strong sense of community, emphasizing equality and autonomy. My colleagues’ care and support deeply influenced my understanding of teamwork within social-oriented organizational models, especially in exploring social issues and interdisciplinary collaborations.
From a geographical perspective, Taktopia’s projects were not limited to Tokyo and its surrounding areas. Their work extended to other regions of Japan, each with its unique culture, regional customs, lifestyles, and not to mention local food and cuisines. Taktopia, as an educational institution, put a great emphasis on collaborating with individual students and schools, making their work on social issues both rich and interdisciplinary by offering courses in arts, film, sustainability, and more. Beyond the classroom, Taktopia collaborates with local governments, non-profit organizations, rural grass-root community initiatives, and international cultural exchanges in South and Southeast Asia.
By participating in these diverse societal projects at Taktopia, I got involved with their partnered organizations and started collaborating with people on supporting sexual minorities and international students at Tokyo universities. I co-founded projects such as Nikai-Koshitsu, Y(Our) Choices, and in 2020, the BluZoo artist group, which explores the tension between individual memory and collective narratives. I held two public exhibitions in Japan, one of which was commissioned to Chengdu, China’s Emerging Artists’ Art Festival, becoming one of the few major exhibitions that publicly discussed personal memories related to the global pandemic.
How did your time as a Shansi fellow impact your career as an artist and your passion for social justice?
I remember that before I started my fellowship in Japan in 2018, I had already spent three summers in Japan studying language, interning, and teaching at a summer school organized by Japanese and American university students for high schoolers. Despite many rewarding and heart-warming encounters and memories, before my fellowship, I often felt that I struggled.
One of the key questions I grappled with before coming to the fellowship was about my relationship with storytelling, memory-sharing, and the personal vs the political: When my personal experiences didn’t align with institutional narratives, should I tell my story? And if so, to whom?
There was a loneliness to being a foreigner, a sense that my stories didn’t quite fit into any mainstream narratives in any of the language/cultural frameworks with which I was familiar. For instance, during my second year in Japan, a passerby discriminated against me, simply because I was Chinese. I remembered that I sobbed to my friends, saying, “I’ll never come back to Japan again; I will never live here.” Yet in another summer, I was warmly cared for by a third-generation Korean-Japanese immigrant family who treated me like one of their own, inviting me into their home and showing me deep hospitality.
These contradictions created a sense of fragmentation in me. I could express some parts of my experience in Chinese. Other parts I could communicate in Japanese, and still others in English, but each telling felt incomplete. Unless I intentionally abridged or critically fabricated certain parts of my experience, I couldn’t express it holistically–otherwise, I was afraid I wouldn't be understood.
How should I narrate my own experiences? How should I understand the malice and kindness I encountered between people? These fragmented experiences often made me want to hide. At times, I felt the pain envelope me; at other times, I felt overconfident, believing that my experiences had prepared me well. But I was confused about where these “conflicting” experiences belonged—were they good or bad? Did I like Japan or dislike Japan? Trying to explain these things to others using binary categories felt limiting.
Especially considering Japan’s history as both a colonizer and a colonized country, with complex and sometimes contentious relationships with China and the U.S., it became clear to me that our histories and memories are deeply intertwined. Bringing all these experiences into my fellowship, my experience continues to question: What constitutes a community in a culture? Who are the “outsiders” or “foreigners”? Who has the right to decide what gets recorded? If each of us has unique, special experiences, what brings us together?
Laura at Taktopia, 2019.
During the fellowship, I was exposed to various ways of living, cultural environments, political conditions, and life choices. I’ve begun to patiently observe the people who manifest care, community, and love to their environment. I engage in questions that build and weave a system of language—a way of expression to hold space for a community—that can unpack these nuanced, non-binary experiences. My fellowship taught me that my experience doesn’t need to fit a mold - I don’t need to find a place where I belong. Instead of searching for belonging, a home, or a place of comfort, I can create my own narrative, my own story—even mythmaking, and a haven, a refuge, an Ibasho (居場所), a jia(家) with people who showed me care and I care for.
The Shansi Fellowship was like a portal that transported me from a highly structured, academic environment into a world of far more diverse values and perspectives—a vast open plain, or perhaps a long scroll unfolding before me. Using the scroll as a metaphor, when I arrived in Japan, my body, lived experiences, and the knowledge I’d gathered from Oberlin’s classes and my previous exploration became my paintbrush and palette. The fellowship provided me with an ever-expanding canvas that extends endlessly in all directions, allowing me to explore freely.
In challenging moments I would ponder, “Is this the limit? Can I keep going?” And every time, I received support—not just from my host organization, but also from the Shansi staff and my cohort which encouraged me to keep exploring. Over the span of more than two years, I could feel my style and interests evolving, a canvas ever-expanding. But those traces I left behind—the marks I made, the scars and mistakes, as well as the relational threads I wove between communities—were significant in shaping the path I walked and continue towards.
And, I always know, I am not alone.
If coming to the fellowship, I have Shansi and its community,
I now also have a support system which I co-built during the fellowship.
What advice would you give to fellows interested in following a creative path? What would you tell your younger self?
I really enjoy having conversations with both my past and future selves—this practice often integrates into my meditation, especially when I encounter difficulties or feel lost. These conversations help me break free from the linear concept of time and open up my understanding of time’s relativity.
Looking back now, my current focus has shifted more towards research, especially around themes like memory, mourning, loss, and how to understand and heal collective trauma. I'm less concerned with the specific medium I use to express these ideas. I try to use the tools I’m already familiar with as much as possible. If I hit a bottleneck or come across a technique I don't know, I’ll ask friends who specialize in that area or work with collaborators. I no longer feel the need to master every medium myself, which I think comes from the sense of freedom and growth I experienced during my fellowship in Japan, where I was able to explore and develop without rigid constraints.
As someone who is still exploring the artistic path, and as my freshly graduated self, we would continue asking: What kind of art does our world need? What kind of future do we hope to create together with our chosen family, queer kins, families, communities, and ourselves?
I’m very grateful to my 2018-2020 self for being willing to try and explore. I’m also thankful for my community, the Shansi Fellowship, and the supportive partners, collaborators, and chosen family members who I met along the way. They gave me the freedom to follow my own feelings, ask questions, and ultimately carve a path that belongs to me. Even though this path is still small, it has allowed me to meet more partners and my “chosen family,” and to connect with a larger community.
Laura in their home in Tokyo, taken by Leah Aki Wood ‘20.