OzAsia. Antinomy Company. Nexua Arts Centre. 31 Oct 2025
History, culture and lives of women in Asia are an extremely complex unknown to us in the West.
Director Li Yun and Performer Cheng Shih-Yung offer an experience that begins with a warm, building of a relationship with the audience centred on seemingly simple cultural beliefs, practices and institutions all focused on a belief (in many things) and something that unites us all, an obsession with one’s fate in life.
What becomes of us, who we are as a personal, cultural, and national identity is not clear cut in Asian society in some cases. It was most certainly more uncertain in 1957 when Cheng’s Grandmother left China for new life and an arranged marriage.
The tale is told by framing it on the Zi Wei Dou Shu form of Chinese Astrology and its 12 houses of life. A journey of migration, colonisation, subjugation, and survival brilliantly told by melding Cheng’s own complicated blend of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Malaysian heritage as it affected her student life in Taiwan.
Embarking on a Drift into The Unknown is a deeply meditative work, more powerfully so by the addition of an extra layered dimension through the use of wireless headphones that sonically amplify the emotive power of simple sounds, musical instruments, and speak for Cheng when involved in action only. Lin Jhao An’s set design and Chien Fang-Yu’s lighting are a perfect fusion of carefully managed light and dark, essential to establishing a sense of time past, time present. Wen Cheng-Han’s sound design is utterly masterful in its capacity to blend seamlessly with story and action to the point it is noticed not as imposed, but enhancing in very deeply affecting ways.
Cheng’s performance is subtly sublime, deeply measured and astute in emotional transitions between her personal story and that of her ancestor and ancestor’s world.
What we come to understand as Cheng’s tale unfolds is fate for an Asian woman is tied as much to name at birth and more. A superb contrast is drawn to inclusion of excerpts from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Eurpides Medea.
A European/Western parallel is drawn with such subtle starkness, it’s impossible not to grasp the deeper meaning in what this work is seeking to explore and say about a woman’s lot in Asia and South-East Asia.
It is a difficult thing attempting to ‘translate’ a cultural experience in contemporary and historic terms. Yet in unspoken ways, this is achieved.
While the work’s innate power would be greatly served by tightening transitions, it is nonetheless a powerful, significant experience of communicating a new understanding of ancient and contemporary realities.
David O’Brien
When: 31 Oct to 1 Nov
Where: Nexus Arts Centre
Bookings: Closed
