Julie Zhen
陈臻 Julie Zhen (she/her) is a performance practitioner and researcher, receptionist, call center operator, linguist, dancer, performer/actress, and bazaar worker. She took part in the contemporary dance piece Beyond the Skin (2023), directed by Marina Santo and premiered at Teatro Pradillo. She collaborates with the Red Diáspora China and has participated in the performance works: What Do You See When You See Blue (2023), premiered at the Artistic Residencies Center of Matadero Madrid, and in the collective actions Round Table, held at the National Museum of Anthropology: How Do You Say Knee in Your Dialect (2024) and Collective Round Table Performance (2024). Recently, she presented the art installation An Empty Book (2025) together with Omali Bue at the Exhibition Hall of the Autonomous University of Madrid, which questions ocularcentrism and the primacy of writing as a form of knowledge in relation to the book and text. In June 2025, she will premiere the theatre play Everything I Never, by Charlie Erroz, and is preparing the film Elles, by Natalia González — two projects in which she plays the leading role.
Qué ves cuando ves amarillo
The project What Do You See When You See Yellow emerges from my desire to invoke yellow and brown Asian bodies more present on stage. I am not motivated by the idea of breaking stereotypes or carrying the burden of representation, nor am I concerned with tokenization. These premises are part of demands for inclusivity that remain heavily subordinated to an ocularcentric regime of visibility/invisibility, which subjects bodies to a media attention economy that is white, colonial, cis-heteronormative, and Eurocentric.
Being present as an Asian body already differs from being present without any adjective or label accompanying the word ‘body.’ Understanding this specificity, with the appearance of more bodies in motion, already tells a narrative, despite the breaking of many contemporary codes that disrupt the linear narrative of dramatic theater and modern dance. The invisibility of the body and labor outside the so-called live arts overlooks the logic of Asian bodies already present in other performative actions in daily life and capital. Putting the body and attention on what an Asian body means in the current moment is to ask what questions might arise when bodies that are rarely seen appear before an audience on stage and then disappear again.
I aim to investigate the abjection tied to queer bodies that cannot be separated from the inscrutability associated with racialization. Asian bodies revive this strangeness, opacity, and inscrutability in a very particular way. The silence, distance, and invisibility situated in those gazes that perceive us are constitutive of modern-colonial configurations. What would it mean to exploit all these directions through movement and the relationship between multiple bodies, both within and outside themselves, in one space?
