Pinning the “Post-Orientalist Express” to a single definition is tricky. In preparation for my interview with Eun-Me Ahn, I encountered terms such as “campy” and “playful” across several articles. These descriptors often appeared alongside words such as “confrontational,” “subversive,” and “riotous.” Considering Ahn’s ambition to try and dissect decades of Asian exoticism, the dissonance feels warranted.
Ahn is one of South Korea’s most celebrated artists and choreographers. Her anarchistic approach to performance has earned her a reputation as a joyful provocateur. In one performance, she jumped from the top of a crane and attacked a piano with an axe and scissors, eventually ending in a teddy bear dance. However, there’s more going on below the chaotic surface. At the heart of Ahn’s practice lies a fixation with the clash between tradition and modernity. Her curiosity continues with ‘Post-Orientalist Express’, which has made its way down under as a part of this year’s Sydney Festival.
Firstly, congratulations on the “Post-Orientalist Express”. How does it feel to have Australian audiences finally see the show?
I am truly happy and honoured to be part of this beautiful edition of Sydney Festival and to be able to present this piece here. Because of its history and geography, Australia has been a mix of cultural influences, somewhere at the crossroad between Asia and the West. The message of this piece is how we can break representations, categories and clichés in the search of a new common identity and how we get over so we can all live together in harmony.
The show challenges the Western concept of the “orient” and the idea of othering, especially within Asia. What was the catalyst to turn these ideas and themes into a performance?
“Post-Orientalist Express” is a journey to shatter the Western-made mirror called “the Orient” and redraw the map. It declares a step beyond the Orientalism Edward W. Said identified – the myth of an “East” constructed by the Western gaze.
The work begins from a paradox: “Everything and nothing is mine.” Audiences pass through Erehwon (Nowhere, read backwards), a topsy-turvy space where names are reversed – Aniha (China), Aeroka (Korea), Napaja (Japan) – and the power structures behind what we assume to be cultural identity are rearranged.
The crucial point is this: Orientalism is not only a Western gaze. Within Asia, we also Orientalise one another. Recognising this dense web of mutual othering – Korea toward Japan, Japan toward China, China toward Korea – I realised that simple rejection was impossible; it already lives within and among us. So I chose strategic essentialism: rather than discarding this tangled field of fact and fantasy, I reclaim it as a shared human resource that collapses the old East/West hierarchy – borrowing traditions, constantly shifting their expressions, recombining them, and creating new meanings.
When undertaking a production this massive, how do you initially approach the work?
My work always begins with on-site research. I started travelling extensively across Asia around 2019, and Post-Orientalist Express is, in many ways, the condensed outcome of that long process.
Together with the dancers, I visited numerous places and met artists, researchers, and historians. I believe movement cannot be created without understanding the body, rhythms, and social and historical contexts of a place.
The process usually unfolds in three stages. First, I share the core questions and themes of the work with the dancers. Then, each dancer begins to draw out the movement materials they already carry—their bodily memories and physical possibilities. Finally, we look for the physical strength and density that allow those movements to enter the piece. When strong images or scenes emerge, I reposition them within the overall flow, building connections and gradually layering the structure.
Along with contemporary dance, you’ve also studied traditional shamanism. What inspired you to combine both modes of dance into your practice? Do you think of dance as a tool to preserve cultures and histories?
My movement is a physical language that moves between ritual and play. Shamanism taught me that the body is not simply a tool of expression, but a medium that communicates with the world and catalyses change. A shaman’s dance is not performed for spectators; it functions as a passage between gods and humans, life and death, past and present—charged with trance, healing, and transformation.
Contemporary dance, by contrast, trained a secular and critical vocabulary: deconstruction, rupture, individual expression. I do not place these traditions in opposition. Instead, I channel shamanic energy through contemporary form.
My movement vocabulary emerges at the point where the sacred becomes secular and the absolute turns relative: violent tremors, circular spins, sudden arrests and eruptions—energies rooted in Korean shamanic ritual, yet deliberately composed within a contemporary syntax.
For me, dance is always evolving. I am Asian, Korean, a woman—these identities shape me, but they do not confine me. I am constantly trying to push beyond fixed categories, while remaining conscious of where I come from and the position from which I speak.
On top of every other aspect of ‘Post-Orientalist Express’, you also designed all 90 costumes for the show. Can you talk about the amount of work that went into designing, fabricating, and producing so many costumes?
I have worked with my costume maker, Yunkwan Design, for nearly twenty-five years. Because of this long collaboration, he understands precisely what kinds of cutting and stitching are required to realise my designs, which significantly shortens the process of communication.
The work itself is extremely repetitive and physically demanding. Early in the morning, I go to the fabric market to look at materials and purchase samples. I then visit Yunkwan’s studio to create prototypes, bring them into the rehearsal space, and have the dancers wear them while moving. Over the course of making a piece, this cycle is repeated dozens—sometimes hundreds—of times.
I consider costume to be an extension of the dancer’s body. When a movement or image emerges, I create samples step by step. Once a piece is completed, I reconsider how it connects to the scenes before and after it within the larger structure. The most important factors are the weight placed on the dancer’s body and, because my works involve many costumes, the speed of costume changes.
Accessories and decorative elements must also be adjusted according to each dancer’s physique and movement structure. This requires a great deal of hand-stitching, time, and labour. Each costume is completed through its relationship with movement.
Do you have expectations from an audience when they’re watching your work?
I hope audiences leave with a sensory experience and a new way of seeing. Like the paradox “everything and nothing is mine,” I want you to encounter the strangeness that emerges when things are mixed – until the question “Whose is this?” begins to dissolve. “Post-Orientalist Express” is not merely a stage work; it is a forum where audiences and artists share both process and concept.
Above all, I hope viewers will not confine this work to the “East,” but instead carry with them the very idea of Inter-—its openness, its frictions, its generative potential—and use this methodology as a springboard for their own thinking and imagination. That is why I invite you on this journey, and what I most wish for you to take away.
We’re currently experiencing a time where Asian faces and bodies are being constantly exposed to the West, whether through K-pop, anime, or social and mainstream media. As a final question, what are your thoughts on how Asia is being represented to the West? In what ways would you like to see it changed?
I believe Asian culture has become more visible globally not because it speaks from a single nation or fixed identity, but because it has generated an inter- sensibility. If K-culture had spoken only about “Korea,” it might not have produced the response we see today.
Historically, Korea has responded quickly to this inter- condition. Survival was never possible through self-sufficiency alone. Instead, Korea expanded by absorbing, mixing, and transforming what came from others—a strategy aligned with both its history and a basic human survival instinct. Rather than drawing rigid boundaries between the internal and the external, new forms naturally emerged in between.
K-pop can be understood in this context. It can be seen as a response to Western-constructed Orientalist clichés, arising from a search for autonomy and originality. Through this process, various forms—K-bands, K-culture—have emerged. This is not a matter of good or bad, but of understanding the conditions from which these forms were born. Importantly, K-pop fandom culture and the popularity of K-dramas first developed within Asia before expanding globally.
This is exactly what I explore in Post-Orientalist Express. The concept of Inter-Asia does not aim to erase or unify differences within Asia, but to treat difference itself as creative material. And this idea does not belong only to Asia. If these inter- practices continue to expand and intersect, they may offer new imaginative models that connect continents—for instance, spaces where Asia and Africa transform tension and difference into creative energy.
I believe the value of inter-—the dynamics generated between multiple intersections—offers a more meaningful direction than the logic of pan-, which assumes a single identity or unified whole. It suggests a future that does not eliminate difference, but learns how to endure it, translate it, and live together through it.
Thanks to Eun-Me Ahn for taking the time to chat and the good people at Common State for making this happen. Sydney Festival kicks off tomorrow night (8/1), with the “Post-Orientalist Express” playing over the next few days. Click here for more information, including ticketing.
