Posted in performance art, tagged body, Chinese Culture, identity, immigration, performance art, rice, Vancouver on August 23, 2011|
3 hours at Nomad Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2010
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.
photo credit: Bitshere
Posted in performance art, tagged body, Chinese Culture, feminism, gender, humanity, identity, identity politics, immigration, intimacy, love, minority, performance art, politics, postcolonialism, power, rice, sexuality, Vancouver on June 10, 2011|
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.
Posted in performance art, tagged aesthetics, Chinese Culture, language, performance art, power, relationship, rice, translation, white males on June 7, 2010|
photo by James Zhang
four hours at Western Front Gallery
I set a desk 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 desk, 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 mannequin. This process is repeated until the rice on the plate is thoroughly transferred.
This performance refers that the sense of authenticity, integrity and beauty of resource language get lost in translation. The rice in this performance is a metaphor of text. I am sitting on a desk, translating a big plate of text to my reader who is devouring this plate in its translated form. My reader may understand the subject, but the quality of what he has consumed is definitely not the same as the original once. In fact, translating a text is like chewing up rice and then feeding it to somebody else. 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 that translators strive to approach but it can never truly be reached.
Posted in performance art, tagged aesthetics, Chinese Culture, culture, humanity, identity, immigration, interactive technology, painting, performance art, postcolonialism, power, rice, Vancouver on May 21, 2010|
photo courtesy of artist
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 the amount of black rice equals the amount of white rice. The audiences are invited to sit down in front of me, and we work together.
“Hourglass” is a rice-based performance that examines “deterritorialization” and “disessentialization” in the Taken-for-Granted world through exploring oppositions as manifestations of fundamental existential concern in Chinese philosophy. 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.
The gesture of painting white rice to black is a political gesture, a democratic process of negotiations between citizens and established power. It reveals my desire not only to negotiate and transform everyday political life to art, but also to install a model for social transformation that possibly could create a new way to look at utopia and future. For me, political gesture doesn’t have to be radical, and process of social transformation does not have to involve violence. In fact, it could be done through meditative way or even meditation because meditation itself is intervention: a method of protest, a strategy of negotiation and a way of speak-out. This performance is more relevant to open conversation about how to transform social and political landscapes, examining relationships between the citizens and the place they live, between what they have lost and what they have gained in the rapid changing city. This rice performance provides an opportunity for participants/ citizens to meditate their situations while working together on a mutual goal: reconfigure the established centralized power system in order to create an equal, fair and balanced world.
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
Posted in performance art, tagged Chinese Culture, Chinese philosophy, culture, identity, immigration, minority, multiculturalism, performance art, politics, rice, Vancouver, Ying and Yang on May 21, 2010|
it was performed at Chapel Arts and Emily Carr University in 2010
I fill a bamboo basket with white and black rice, so there is white rice on the left, black rice on the right. I sit on a bamboo mat, grapping rice and tossing it to audiences.
photo credit: Alina Ilyasova
Posted in performance art, tagged anti-racism, Chinese Culture, culture, humanity, identity, immigration, minority, multiculturalism, performance art, politics, postcolonialism, power, rice, Ying and Yang on May 21, 2010|
performed at PAct 4: Trade opening at Vancouver International Centre for contemporary Asian Art and Pacific Cinematheque, 2010
I sit on a bamboo matt and demonstrate a process of selecting rice: I lift a sieve and gently shake it to screen out the smaller rice, and then I put the sieve on the matt and pick out the imperfections. the gestures of shaking the sieve and picking the rice are repeated hours.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong 
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