Between the Lines: Generations of Books
December 6, 2024
Presented by CultureHub LA
Between the Lines centers around three books, each representing a member of a family across three generations: a former nuclear facility worker, a romantic medical student, and a Chinese immigrant artist based in Los Angeles. For the Chinese, a historical divide compresses what would be 4 centuries of European upheaval into a mere 40 years, splitting a generation into disparate eras.
CultureHub Resident Artist Ina Chen combines a live book-reading performance with a bespoke table platform holding authentic artifacts, objects, and documents from the respective eras, inviting the audience to engage directly with these materials. By traversing these intergenerational narratives, the piece captures the immense scale of change and the fractures it creates within a nation and a family. Amidst ideological rifts and silences at the dinner table, it is the quiet, enduring power of love that continues to unite the family, forming a delicate bridge across the divide.
Between the Lines: Generations of Books was developed in the CultureHub Residency Program