Pushing Hands Collective 推⼿屯

Pushing Hands Collective 推手屯 is a multi-disciplinary team with 6 members — Ching Shu, Di, Johanne, Many, Zeph and Zhouzhou— coming from performance, visual arts, sound, anthropology and education studies. They’re also a part of ST1CKYR1CE. Pushing hands comes from a physical practice used in martial arts to train balance and ground bodies . Their collective builds on this, using it as a philosophical metaphor and navigational compass, thus integrating communal tool-making, workshops, cooking, mapping, and dance music. Through their Pushing Hands Gatherings, they explore ways to care for Asian communities and give space to questions around identity, migration, and belonging.

They occasionally organise events which welcome nonAsian allies. The collective’s work is linked to Sinophone Studies (華語語系研究), which questions conventional notions like “the Chinese diaspora” and Chineseness from the margins, both outside geopolitical China — formed through historical migration and settlement — and within China, where non-Han Chinese groups navigate Han cultural dominance through various responses, from assimilation to resistance. Pushing Hands collective has roots in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Switzerland, with members who grew up both in Europe and Asia. They reflect and refigure their histories and identities through our in-betweenness within a transnational context. Through a Sinophone lens, we seek to encourage Asian communities to share their unique first-person perspectives, challenge the westernisation of Asian narratives, uncover untold stories, and deepen the understanding of the nuances and commonalities within our communities that bind us beyond nation-state borders.