I wear my Chinese traditional dress, walking on streets and asking white males to have photo taken with me by suggesting them to act as my husband– to explore intimacy between two strangers in public space. immigrated to Canada couple of years ago, and i regard the whole process of immigration as a marriage, and myself like a mail order bride. I married Canada, suddenly transforming myself from a Chinese to a Canadian or a Chinese Canada. My identity is not constructed by Canadian history, culture or its landscape, but the white males who are around me.
The physical encounter between me and the white males actually is an ideological confrontation between me and the Western social and political landscape that I feel I don’t belong to. By exploring intimacy with them, I try to not only reconfigure the established centered power that the privileged white males embody, but also question whether the culturally interpreted Chinese female body, both as a foreign subject and object, can be invested and exploited.
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.
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.
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.
