Group show, Where is your hometown, XY Gallery, Guangzhou, China, 06.12.2024-10.01.2025

Friday 06 December 2024 - Friday 10 January 2025

Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-19:00(booking)

XY Gallery, East zone of Haixinsha Asian Games Park, NO.32

This exhibition requires reservation.

Courtesy of artist ©Adagp, Paris, 2024

Yao Qingmei

Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling!

2013

Performance video

10’55

Yao Qingmei assumes the guise of a fictional persona ‘Bruce Ling’ holding a hammer and sickle in each hand. The performance progresses in a dance sequence amongst a painted bamboo scenery referencing kung fu, socialist era renditions, and ballet. This piece is a combination of performance art and minimalist spectacle. The action that smashes the pot along with the depletion of the body retains hallmarks of Body Art, whilst the scenery and distance to the audience appears adapted from theatre. The artist modulates Bruce Lee’s cry by way of an aria, whilst the pianist accompanies her action with a heavily romanticized rendition of Fury of the Dragon theme tune. The transformation of action culminates towards a paradoxical situation, Bruce Ling’s dance is in all seriousness, too seri-ous, her stiff body is awkward – the humor is further charged with the earnest artist trying ever so hard to embody a character transcending beyond the limits of the artist’s own natural aptitude. 

Performers: YAO Qingmei and pianist Chen Junkai

More information about this work: https://www.yaoqingmei.com/danse

Courtesy of artist ©Adagp, Paris, 2024

Yao Qingmei

Blowing a Feather

2024

Performance

Moment Research New York

20’

The performers blow a feather until it lands. This performance unfolds in a practice-like manner, incorporating experiments with sound, text fragments, breath rhythms, and body movements. In the brief moments when the feather is blown up and then descends, each performer showcases their unique movement vocabulary and training experience. Jumps, spins, twists, whistling, murmurs, screams— the performers' movements and sounds are continuously interrupted by the falling feather. In an uncontrollable randomness led by the feather, performers gradually gather into a group. Ultimately, we collaborate to gently blow the feather, moving slowly, achieving a bodily resonance within the choral harmony.

The text recitation of my part in this performance:

“I’m Qingmei, Although I am not a dancer. my body was disciplined through collective morning exercise training, from elementary school to university. These movements are tight, firm, perfectly straight, directional, minimalist, rational, and military, insualated from any softness and sensuality. It shapes an absolutely boring body architecture, a repetitive and mechanical system, driven by perpetual ideological positivity, strength, and certainty.”

More information about this work: https://www.yaoqingmei.com/feather