'Passing Through Like a Ghost’ is my latest solo project in 2023. This series comprises seven works: ‘Conversations with Spirit’, ‘Curse’, ‘Twilight’, ‘Come Back to Your Mammy’, ‘Most of the Time, They Make You Shut Up’, ‘Ghost’, and ‘Gift’.

 

This practice project is partly based on my current research, that is, the concern of hope, cruelty, positivity and negativity, as well as feminism. It focuses on the complicated and intertwined relationship between hope, cruelty and pain in today's meritocratic and accelerated positivity society. Through a series of enquiries, it aims to reflect on the violence of positivity in contemporary society, as well as the resulting general exhaustion, burnout, fear and hopelessness that permeates among the younger generation, especially rooted in China. 

 

This study considers how to apply negativity or re-evaluate the value of negativity as a means to relieve the acceleration of this violence. For instance, in my practice, it is achieved by exploring how inefficient production, such as slowness, waiting, breathing etc. works. And it explores how those kinds of ways of self-caring and spirituality can be understood as a means of a feminist method and a self-healing way, and vice versa. It aims to an expectation of more fair and ‘healthy’ living conditions and environmental justice. 

 

And, here, I would highlight that this ‘hope’, which is different from ‘positivity’ that may bear cruelty and pain, can probably serve as a significant constructively supportive and changeable power in this turbulent world. Simultaneously, based on my previous practice, I would further explore how to propose a kind of negativity that can function as a temporary aesthetic strategy to resist this positive violence in performance art, as well as how to apply it as a new experiment of performance grammar and performance technologies in this field.

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Conversations with Spirit, Performance Video, 14’10”, 2023

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In the early morning wilderness, I sit at a table, consuming bread, milk, and honey. Then, I stand on the table, continuously looking up at the sun. Standing amidst the wind and morning dew, I await the arrival of a sneeze.