One of many things you should know about Natalie Tin Yin Gan is that she has a rare double degree in international studies and dance from SFU.

This might go some way toward explaining the cultural, political, and artistic complexities of her work, which pushes into multimedia, performance art, and dance theatre. Take NINEEIGHT, a piece she created with the interdisciplinary arts company Hong Kong Exile: it’s a wild encapsulation of the anxiety in Hong Kong before its handover to China in 1997, delivered through a disorienting mix of projected texts and dance based on the absurdist slapstick of mo lei tau cinema popular in that era.

But it would only be the start of comprehending the forces that influence the constantly questioning artist. Even her double degree created its inner struggles for Gan.

“It was really challenging for me to choose whether I wanted to go into the performing arts or international studies,” she says, sitting in the Gold Saucer Studio in the historic Dominion Building. “I ended up going back to my high school teacher/mentor and he said, ‘The world will always be in need of saving; I’ve seen you dance and it’s something you have to do and if you don’t you might regret it.’ ”

Gan went on to graduate from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts and launch Hong Kong Exile with theatre artist Milton Lim and composer Remy Siu. This year, she has several gigs coming up with them, including Room 2048, at the Firehall Arts Centre in April, interpreting the delirious imagery of longing and loss in the films of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. (Look for a sneak-preview excerpt at Dance Allsorts on November 13.) “It has a lot to do with our relationship to nostalgia—nostalgia for a past that wasn’t ours as a gang of first- and second-generation Canadian-born Chinese,” she hints.

At the same time, her own practice is undergoing momentous change, she reports—taking her ever farther from her roots, as a kid into Chinese classical dance and hip-hop. Her postsecondary training steered her deeply into contemporary dance, but more recently she’s been hugely influenced by 2015’s LIVE Biennale of performance art. There, she took part in the risqué work of San Francisco rebels La Pocha Nostra. “I had an amazing time improvising that hourlong piece—it was all sorts of crazy!” She also helped bring to life the dreamlike chaos of music, brocade costumes, and video imagery of Vietnam’s Le Brothers (Stories in a Story). In fact, in October, she’s doing a residency at the twins’ studio in Hue.

Performance art has freed her. “It’s much riskier, and risk is where I thrive,” she says. Look no further than Chinese Vaginies, a piece she staged at last spring’s FUSE event at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where her performers took a playful look at food, race, and the female body.

Explaining her “critical shift”, she says: “I’ve been trying to shed layers of my dance training, largely as a result of working with my mentor Lee Su-Feh,” referring to the Vancouver dance veteran who’s working as a dramaturge on Room 2048. “It taught me to exist in a certain kind of white, colonized body and it taught me a lot of Eurocentric dance history. I tried for a long time to fit into that world and yet bring in my own personality. Now I’m going back to my body and my own organic impulses,” she adds. The questioning continues.