Aug. 2020 - Work-in-progress of the studio version, KW Studios (Vancouver, Canada) 

https://vimeo.com/482174505 (performance - 25 min.) 

15 August 2020 - Work-in-progress of the site-specific version, Vines Art Festival (at Hadden Park, near Kitsilano Beach, Vancouver, Canada) Video documentation by David Laslo

https://vimeo.com/448316000 (performance: 45 min.) 

Songs of Absence is a segment of my performance series No Man’s Land, which I have been developing for the last few years. It is based on the character Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Lavinia is the daughter of Titus, a general in the Roman army who is engaged in a cycle of revenge. I focus on the scene in which Lavinia is raped, and is then hung from a dead tree trunk. Her tongue and hands were cut off by the assailants after she was raped. The violence is not visualized nor indicated; it is indirectly implied through her response to it through silence. How I can embody her silent response to such horrific violence is my main question. 

Human Flags

2021 (Vancouver, Canada) 

Dance for video - Performance, Sound, Direction, Video, and Editing; https://vimeo.com/690184833 

I created a series of 3-to-10 minute long videos of body movements, inspired by Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics,” a book of short stories describing the birth and progression of the universe. 

“Human Flag” is inspired by the first story “At Daybreak”, which is about the birth of the universe. Here I use thrashing body movements on the ground, in white cloth, to convey the violent energy which breaks the vast emptiness of the universe, allowing creation of the first living thing. 

11 June - 24 July 2011, Kunst im Tunnel (Berlin, Germany) in “Human Frames”

Dance for video - Performance, Sound, Direction & Editing, Video by En-jin Yang

https://vimeo.com/11198916 

White noise from the radio implies the constant interruption of a social system, which shapes our lives, through the conceptual grids of time and space, into chains of meaningless instants to which the sleeper reacts spasmodically. 

We cannot see the sleeper’s nightmare. The sleeper is in her nightmare and absent from this reality. But we can clearly see that she is trying to wake up. While her struggle is vivid, we can only witness her falling back into the lonely place of her nightmare. 

“Nightmare” is my act of silence that fights against the instrumental, commodified languages of authoritarianism. This silence is the lonely place behind the glass wall of language. It tries to speak, and yet its language remains silent behind that wall. It can only be seen in its silence.