Title: Ouroboros
Year: 2024
Medium: Performance
Duration:20 mins
Location: Matsugashita Miyabiyu Hot Spring
In ancient China and South America, humans used knot-tying as a record-keeping system similar to digital coding in between language and writing. Humans preserved a rich non-verbal history through the structure, quantity, materials, and arrangement of knots. The inspiration for this piece is the thousands of khipu found in the Inca Empire's archaeological sites. I will use ropes and body, within the chaos and rebirth of geothermal and tidal forces, to weave and unravel a dimension of time and space with the audience on-site. The knots created will ultimately serve as evidence for future archaeology.
The repetitive physical labor involved in knot-tying, and the resulting knots, continually generate the dispersion and regeneration of symbolic meanings as they transform and expand. Similarly, abstract concepts, such as faith, blessings, and wishes observed in religious practices, often need to manifest on observable, perceivable, and tangible material bases to enter reality, referred to as "witnessing" and "evidence." My work aims to provide a phenomenological experience that transcends linguistic dialectics and returns to the viewer's sensory experience.
Cultural heritage and retrospection are built on material history. Technological advancements constantly evolve the methods of preserving archives and memories. In these expanded new dimensions, people continually update their ways of participation. Do sacred moments still exist in virtual, innovative experiences, and even the inconceivable future? I attempt to create a path through the vast ocean of archives, using bodily sensory imagination and inter-person relationships, to connect the past and future. Perhaps by returning to, expanding, and internalizing the physical body, we can grasp some evidence of the present.
Sound design: Jonathan Grover
Videographers: Pei-Ju Lin, Tsai-Hsun Peng, Inhan Choi
Editor: Nebula Creatived LLC.
All rights reserved. 2024 Hui-Ying Tsai
(script)
Story 1: Fairy Bow (unrestrained body)
When I was about 5 or 6, I loved wearing dresses. I liked to play prince and princess getting married and walking in a castle. My girl friend had short hair and would always play the handsome prince, and I was the beautiful long-hair princess.
Yeah, Rrapunzel.
It was fashionable at the time that the dress had two waist straps to tie a bow on the back to create a flattering silhouette, like a sophisticated girl. The bow always made me think of a well-wrapped gift, I thought the idea of wrapping a person is silly.
I don't care much about the bow, and I prefer to feel my body unrestrained, so I untied it as soon as I got to school. I imagine the two straps are the extension of my body, like the wings of a fairy, the tentacles of an octopus, or the superpower rainbow that can shoot to places beyond my knowledge.
I spin and spin as if I were flying! I made all the girls join me, and we couldn't stop laughing until we all fell to the ground.
I had so much fun!
Story 2: Cutting Hair (mutilation)
I have always loved my black long hair, especially my grandmother often talked about how dark my hair was, I thought that meant it was beautiful. I never wanted to cut my hair short as a kid.
My mom tried many ways to persuade me to get a haircut, including telling me that I looked like a ghost in classical folklore.
It finally got to me one night, I was startled by my reflection on the glass door and agreed to the haircut the next day. I was around 12.
Anyway, I had to cut my hair short to go to middle school sooner or later. Long hair is a violation of the dress code. We were only allowed to have an unflattering, sad, and plain hairstyle to this length.
My mother had been pushing me to cut my hair short for years way before middle school started. It was out of the widespread fear of violence toward females with long hair or ponytail.
Some perverts would follow women with long hair home in the dark alley and disfigure their faces or cut their throats. I wouldn’t blame my mother.
Why?
Why is my hair hated?
Why is it dangerous and so wrong?
All the proper girls should secretly learn the tricks of accidental seductivity.
But I am a different kind of animal
I DESPISE SHAME!!
Story 3: Memory at the Sea (sexuality discovery)
Oh, yes, the purple seashell.
My grandparents lived on the small island of Penghu, I used to spend the summer there, and my favorite thing is beachcombing for seashells.
One day when I was lost in the treasure from the ocean, a purple shell was gifted to me by a boy. I was looking at this mesmerizing seashell and I wasn't just looking.
A very strange thing happened, all my senses suddenly became vivid like never before!
The sound of the waves, the seabird, the salt in the air that I can taste, the sand between my toes, the breeze on my skin,...the heat from the sun, and the heat..was not just from the sun.
My eyes followed the seashell and climbed onto his arm, I saw the backlited golden tiny soft hairs covering his skin with many droplets in between.
I can't tell if it is the ocean or his sweat.
This is not about that boy, nor a romance,
But it was a very important moment in my life.
It was the moment I became my own person, and discovered sexuality.
Oh!
Nature was oppressed as if I would never find out myself.
I got it between the land and the water.
The POWER of my body, this hair, my skin, the legs, and everything in between.
