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. 

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.