M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer

Berlin-based Hong Kong artist Isaac Chong Wai opened the Sunday show with his choreographed performance, Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises (2018). Based on training exercises witnessed by the artist in police academies around the world, the piece transforms repetitive, aggressive movements into a tender and poetic dance, inviting spectators to reconsider the aesthetics of public protest. Clashes between protestors and the police are crystallized into gestures and facial expressions, questioning whether beauty can be found in confrontation.

Presenting a more directly interactive work, Taiwanese artist River Lin constructed a confessional with shelves of water bottles in Cleansing Service (2016–18), offering visitors a chance to wash their sorrows away. Each water bottle is labeled with a word related to Lin’s personal life experiences, such as “ghost” and “Tinder.” The participant is asked to choose a bottle that also articulates his or her own life experience. As the artist and participant share personal stories, the former pours water onto the latter’s hands over a basin. Feeling the coolness of water trickling past my fingertips, a sense of tranquility came over me in this process of purification. Through this cathartic ritual, the artist draws out personal memories and existential questions while healing the pain of the participant. 

Similarly exploring memory and intimacy, Braunschweig-based Chinese artist Duan Yingmei collected items of significance from 18 Hong Kong artists and placed them in different corners of the gallery space before the show for My Hong Kong Friends (2018). Like a magical guide in a fairy tale, Duan takes viewers on a tour of this “memory land,” speaking about the items in a childlike voice and asking participants to interact with them. These collected objects include letters, photographs, fans, hand-made dolls, a bracelet, items of clothing, and even a dish of pork, which viewers may pick up, touch, examine closely, wear and taste. My Hong Kong Friends offers viewers a unique way of looking at everyday objects and encourages viewers to think about how these items carry the memories of their owners.

The show ended with Indonesian artist Tisna Sanjaya’s 99 Sajadah Merah (“99 Red Praying Mats”) (2018), in which he invites participants to paint on him, as well as a workshop called “Painting with Spice.” True to these titles, the gallery space was filled with the scent of cinnamon, and covered with red rugs and canvases. “Painting is an act of praying,” says Sanjaya to the audience; every step in the process bears an element of gratitude and faith. During the workshop, Sanjaya asks one of the participants to stand in front of a canvas with his arms spread out. He then scatters cinnamon and charcoal onto the participant and the painting.

M+ Live Art offered the public a fresh experience of performance art and a taster of some of the programs to come. The event brought the words of pioneering Hong Kong performance artist Frog King (Kwok Mang Ho) to mind: he once translated the term “happening,” coined by American artist Allan Kaprow in 1958 to describe the burgeoning genre of live art, to hark bun lum (“the guests are arriving” in Cantonese)—a reminder that it takes both the artist and audience to make this art form work.

Pamela Wong is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.

“M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer” took place at Goethe-Institut, Hong Kong, from June 1 to 3, 2018. 

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