So Far, So Close Yeh Tzu-Chi
Xin1 and Sea 1 Xin,心,in
Chinese means both heart and mind.
Sometimes I am as peaceful
and waveless
as tree, as flower, as
breeze
Sometimes I am so frenzy
that
I would open big mouth to
swallow a whole village
Sometimes I am blue
Deep, shallow, huge, or
small
I can laugh, and I can
jump
Sometimes I lost color,
from gray to dark
I can say nothing but with
tears on my face
Sometimes I am faster than
hare and cheetah
Suddenly become blue,
dark, red, or white
Hard to say
You said I am Sea
I said I am Xin
Xin rarely goes to Sea
Perhaps it knows it is Sea
Sea can only be in the sea
But it knows it’s also in
the body
70 %
A mysterious figure
Thus sea stays so close to
Xin
Caresses her and kisses
her
Xin and Sea
So far, so close
I was thinking about to do
performance both in the mountain and on the beach. I even had title in mind. But then I had more and more desire to do on
the beach only. Wu Yuan/Garden simply
came from the advice of the Government.
I listen more and more to
my own heart as I am getting older. I
couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything against my heart/will. I often danced with the outer world when I
was younger, echoing this and that in the reality, fluttering in the air like
the dust kicked up. But as I grow older,
I’ve found, after rolling a big circle and coming back to the starting point,
that listening to oneself is still the most practical and comfortable way. And the world will not disdain you because of
that at all. As a woman who stepped into
family, I am accustomed to diminish my own voice/self to accomplish the Big
Self of family and society. My son is over
his twenty but my daughter is still in the elementary school. Assumedly I have to work very hard for the
family for another 10 years. With that,
perhaps I can say that I have fulfilled my social responsibility. If it is so, then would you please allow me
to be a little bit selfish in the art world, let me start everything from
heart.
After so many years, I
found that I am that kind of person who is more introvert, likes to meditate,
and enjoys to be alone. Perhaps it explains
why I can live more than 25 years in the southern country side though I was
born and grew up in the vanity metropolitan of Taipei. Living under the blue sky, among the green
field, surrounded by the birds singing, and soaked in the sunset glow, I’ve
never had the desire to go back to live in the city. How I love Nature!
But I would feel mania if
there’s no reading and thinking, no creativity, no art, and no friends of the
like surrounding me. So yes, after so
many years, I think I can say that Performance Art is where I am. It’s something that can settle me down after
forty years of searching.
I did not do art until I
was over forty when my life had already settled down. Therefore I do art just out of love, nothing
else. I do performance because I love
it; curatorial, feedback and responsibility in addition. I have seen so many good artists and good
performances abroad for the past 13 years that I would like to show them to my
people in Taiwan. In the meantime, I
would also like to show my fellow local artists and their performances to the
international art circle.
Thus Mind & Sea: ArTrend International Performance Art Festival is
presented this year. We say Mind &
Sea as Xin Yu Hai in Chinese. Xin is a
very interesting word. It refers to
heart, as well as thinking/concept, intention, and emotion. It’s both the physical heart, and the
abstract mind. Interestingly, it just
echoes what the root of performance art is: body and mind. In the field of live performance, we can
almost say Body is Concept. Body is also
the media and vessel of concept. Accordingly,
Xin is both body and concept. As for
Sea, sometimes it’s as quiet and flat as a mirror; yet sometimes it’s as
turbulent and violent as a monster, the phenomenon of which we can also feel in
our very vast, deep, and changeable heart/mind/inner world. Mind & Sea perhaps therefore can imply
that little cosmos of human being is not unlike the outer big cosmos. Mind is in the Sea. Sea is in the Mind. Mind and Sea mingle as One. The Inner is the Outer.
Like most contemporary
international live art/performance events, Mind
& Sea aims to gather performance artists to present their works. As an artistic category that is characterized
as marginal, cutting edge, and lack of commercial value, live performance attracts very rare attention from gallery,
museum, critic, scholar, or artist. So performance art festival has become a very
important field where performance artists may gather together to support each
other and to polish their art by watching mutual performances. As a showcase of an experimental art
form that cannot be precisely defined, performance art festival usually offers
a field for artists to perform as they wish instead of performing under a
limited theme. In other words,
performance art festival cares more about the artist himself, his mentality and
how he shows it physically, rather than his research and argumentation toward some
specific motif. Artist is the
subject. Performance art festival cares
how artist uses his or others’ bodies, in a period of time, in a specific
space/environment, to carry out a procedure of actions, which make audience on
the spot experiencing something we call broadly as art.
The audience who often go
to the theatre, who often get profile before they see the performing, who
almost always have moral teaching in the drama might feel strange and even uncomfortable
when they first see the so-called live art performance. Very likely, they would complain that they
don’t understand what the performance is all about. But if they can let go the desire to “understand”
and try to feel everything happened with an unadorned, original sensitive
heart, they might be rewarded with something unexpected. After numerous “hitting” back and forth with
the artist, perhaps they would find eventually that they don’t see live
performance only but also themselves.
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