Everywhere and All at once

Pacific National Exhibition, Vancovuer, 2010

“Everywhere and All at Once” is a loop video projected on a 3’ x 4’ table. This video reveals four people, two males and two females, all wearing red nail polish and playing mahjong. The viewers are encouraged to sit on the chairs to experience the installation.

Imaginary Moon

 

photo by James Zhang 2009

Pink Vagina

 

duration: 3 hours at  Access Gallery

I paint a room pink at Access Gallery and invite audiences to paint it white

Rice Performance Series–Another Witness

photo by Bitshere, at Nomad Art Gallery

i carry a bag with rice, walking in a gallery and approaching an audience to have a conversation. when the conversation starts, the rice leaks from my bag. when the conversation is over, the rice stops leaking. And then i move to another audience, the action repeats.

I’m Asking You to Clean My Vagina Wall

photo by Janice Cheung, Bitshere

i set a workshop space at Yactac,  sitting on a table and instructing audiences how to clean vagina wall with ready-made and home-made tools

Rice Performance Series- The Invalid Testimony

performed at SPREAD openning at Chapel Arts, June 3, 2011

duration: one and half an hour

photo by Chad Durnford

I stand against a white wall in a gallery space. There are two bags of rice with a description on the floor right in front of me. Audiences are encouraged to shoot my naked body with rice outside of yellow tape. This action will be repeated until the rice is gone.

After living inCanada for eight year, I realized that there is urgency for me to renew my lost tradition and culture. In the early 2010, I started to use rice to create a series of performances to explore oppositions as manifestations of fundamental existential concern in Chinese philosophy. “The Invalid Testimony” is the fifth one in the rice performance series. This series is not only a ritual meditation, but also an opening conversation, examining relationships between me and the place I live, between what I have lost and what I have gained as a racial minority. However, in “The Invalid Testimony,” I turn the ritual to a battle. The rice that has nurtured me in my whole life becomes a weapon to against myself.  It seems that the only way I regain what I have lost is through surrender.

MY Husbands and I Need A Space to Lie

photo by Golboo Amani

 39 hours at  Concourse Gallery from May 6-20, 2011

I fill a wall space with text: MY HUSBANDS AND I NEED A SPACE TO LIE. I stand in front of the wall, holding a paper: LOOKING FOR A BED. There is a hat with a THANKS sign on the floor. When audience walks in front of me, I shout at them as loud as  I can with very firm and angry tone: HEY! CAN I HAVE SOME CHANGE?

It is a protest performance addressing the fact that I was unable to show my installation work, The Husbands and I, at Emily Carr 2011 Graduate Show. I proposed my work to Graduate Committee in January, 2011 with very detailed descriptions about the work dimension and plan, which involves photos, a plasma TV, and a bed. On May3, 2011, the Graduate Committee came to see my work and said there was no space to show this piece. Later, the committee assigned me a place where it is impossible to install the photos and TV due to technique requirements. As a result, I decided not show the original work but this protest performance.

The Body Is the Candy- After Felix Gonzalez-Torres

performed by Ashlea Conway, photo by Henry Sun

three hours at Artbank Vancouver

I set a medical bed in a gallery space and pour a pile of brightly colored candies on the bed. I wear a doctor outfit, standing in front of the bed with a nurse. I take a candy, peeling its wrap and transmitting it into my month. After having a brief taste, I spit the candy to a plate. The nurse holds the plate and places the candy on the floor, chairs, tables, walls and so on. Sometimes the candy is dropped right in front of an audience’s feet, or deposited a coffee table where an audience is enjoying his/her wine. The nurse often cut audiences conversations in order to place the candy in a certain place.

This performance implies how contemporary medical discourse and biological research continue to objectify the body by treating the patient as a compilation of symptoms and statistics. Diseased body is a docile body, an object, a ready-made shaped by discourse and abstracted through science. It is also an entity continually controlled, denied and manipulated by a biomedical authority. Under this authority, the sick body remains permeable, vulnerable, and mutable. In my performance, I embrace Feliix Gonzalez-Torres’s concept of candy with a Duchampian sensibility to create “portraiture” referring the physicality of the subject’s body. However, different from Feliix Gonzalez-Torres’s, my sweets cannot be consumed by audiences but its authority only. These disfranchised candies themselves are testimony demonstrating a process how its authority studies it, dissects it, sexually harasses it, abuses it, and finally abandons it. However, the testimony is an invalid testimony because we seem to have accepted the fact that we are an object in terms of medical treatments; and this acceptance inevitably maintains us being the most compliant creature under a scalpel.

After Olympia

photo by Phoebe Jin

duration: three hours

I ask my performance partner lying on a medical bed and use my tip tongue touching his whole body inch by inch.

Looking for a White Husband

I am an exotic, compliant and artistic

Asian girl, looking for A WHITE HUSBAND

who would like to take me to his home

and live with him for a day as his mail order bride.

if you think it would be an interesting experience,

please contact me at

artistintheworld@hotmail.com

photo by Bernie Lee