After Olympia

photo by Hua 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.

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Rice Performance Series–The Other Words

photo by James Zhang

four hours at Western Front Gallery

I set a table and two chairs in a gallery space. I sit on a chair, and a male mannequin in front of me. There is a big bowl of cooked rice on the table, I use a spoon to scoop rice, put it into my month, and slowly chew it until it becomes soft and warm. And then I carefully transfer the rice from my month to the spoon, and feed it to the male mannequin’s mouth. This process is continually repeated until the rice on the bowl is thoroughly transferred.

This performance refers that the sense of authenticity, integrity and beauty of resource language get lost in translation. In fact, the process of translation is like chewing up rice and feeding it to people. In performance, what I feed to the mannequin is still rice. However, this transformed rice has already lost its flavor and nutrition. It is the same in translation, clarity and fluency of source text might still be kept in a target text. However, the source text and the target text can never be the same because fidelity in translation is the root which tranlators strive to approach but it can never truly be reached.

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Rice Performance Series–Hourglass

photo and Video by Jame Zhang

perform at Visualieyez 2010 Performance Festival at Latitude 53  and 221 A Artist Run Centre

I set two 14 inch bowls, two pairs of small brushes, and tweezers on a table. I  begin painting white rice with black ink one by one until one day the black rice equals the white rice. The audiences are invited to work together.

“Hourglass” is a rice-based performance that explores “deterritorialization” and “disessentialization” in the Taken-for-Granted world. The action of constantly painting white rice to black is a metaphor of hourglass. Sand in hourglass cannot flow without rotation as if power cannot shift without struggle. Too much power is concentrated on one side seems to be a main factor causing disharmony, confusion and dislocation, which embody on the social turbulence that we see and feel in our daily lives. In fact, power doesn’t bring growth unless we understand the essence of sharing the power. However, our established binary system, the concept of centre and margin, the majority and minority, and the dominated and dominating, still divides us in democratic multicultural societies. Too much power is concentrated on “the centre”, “the majority” or “the dominating” seems to be a main factor causing disharmony and dislocation.

The gesture of painting white rice to black is a political gesture. It reveals my desire to not only negotiate and transform everyday political life to art, but also install a model for social transformation that possibly could create a new way to look at utopia. For me, process of social transformation does not have to involve violence, and the political gesture doesn’t have to be radical. In fact, it can be done through a more peaceful way, a meditative way or meditation. This performance provides an opportunity for participants to meditate our situation whiling working together on a mutual goal: reconfigure the established centralized power in order to create an equal, fair and balanced world.

After living inCanada for nine 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. “Hourglass” is the fourth 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 so called racial minority.

A scientist did a math, there are about 333,000ps grains in the bowl, it takes 20 seconds to paint a grain. As a result, if two people together paint 24 hours/ day, it needs 500 hours to paint half amount of white rice to black.

Hourglass Firgure

http://www.visualeyez.org/2010/09/18/hourglass-figure/

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Silent Participant

photo and video by James Zhang

This work  explores interactive wearable art.  three distance sensors are carefully embedded in flowers  on my dress. A lilypad arduino, a speaker, and batteries are  hidden on the back of the fan I hold . when the viewers use a boom microphone to closely examine the body to search signal, sharp sounds will occur.

The body is an interface. It is not only a site of intercultural encounter, but also a field of intersection of material and symbolic forces. This work doesn’t address much functionality but emotions, memory, fantasy and experience with awareness of body as intimate communicator and symbolic interface. It focuses more on viewers’ experiences: what is sensed, and what cognitive; and aesthetic processes are provoked during the interactive performance.

Silence is a sound that needs to be heard. Silence is meditation that needs to be read, a Ding, a sound to catch attention, a way of making things public, bringing light to shadow and stimulating public reflection and debate about the key issues of our time. Silence is also the intervention of crowd that needs to be seen. Silent doesn’t mean voiceless; if we don’t speak out, it doesn’t mean we don’t care.

Silent Participant is a term that I used to describe Asians living in the West who are often accused of having no opinions, of being indifferent to any politics, and of often sticking in their own ethnic groups. The silent participants are groups of visible minorities, often invisible but needing to be understood.

 

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Foreign Land

photo by Denise Gaudreault and Jero Huang

I stood on a plinth, holding two magnifiers. When the viewers came, I offer the magnifiers to them to closely examine my body. On the right side, there is my digital body on a monitor. This digital body was closely examined through the “eyes” of a camera.

I took the stereotype of regarding woman’s body as Mother Nature to name my body as land. The action of offering the magnifiers to the viewers to closely exam my body is a metaphor of study and investigation, the information I try to transmit is that the more you investigate the foreign, the less you feel threaten, and thus the myth of the others is unveiled

There are two types of body in front of the viewers. But which body the viewers choose depend on which body they feel comfortable with. However, it seems the audiences are more comfortable with the digital body. The body on the video is the same body they encounter, but when they lift magnifier to exam through monitor, what they will see is magnified pixels rather than real skin of my body.

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