We are pleased to announce that the first edition of the annual performance art project “A4 UPON Performance!”, co-sponsored by the A4 Museum Documentation Center and UP-ON Performance Art Archive, has been selected by Shuyi Gao. The first selected artist is Shuyi Gao.
Shuyi Gao will perform his submitted performance work “Time and Water” at A4 Art Museum in June, and will have a residency to share and exchange ideas. The second phase of the performance art program is still recruiting, see the end of this article for the submission method.
Shuyi Gao
Interdisciplinary performing artists
Interdisciplinary performance artist, traveling between London and China to create her work. Her work is rooted in performance art, site-specific performance and theater. Her practice revolves around the fluidity between the public and the private, between memory and the present, between life and death.
In recent years, Gao Shuyi’s practice has evolved from exploring personal emotional landscapes to creating open performance spaces for audience participation and collective exploration. She specializes in transforming everyday objects into triggers for dialogue, guiding the audience to discover their own narratives in the environment.
She views performance as a temporal space – a possibility of transient existence. In this space, one can enter, linger, and perceive; one can reminisce, contemplate, or simply be co-present in a moment.
Ritualistic moments of mourning, celebration and serenity often appear in her work. She sees performance as a carrier of the co-presence of life and death, where lightness and heaviness, presence and absence, are not opposites, but rather an interplay.She is also currently practicing performance as a medium for public engagement and cultural memory work, using performance art as a way to open up bodily experience and public dialogue.
She has performed at spaces and festivals such as Live Art Club, Hypha studios, Hundred Years Gallery, Ruthin Arts Festival, Deptford X Arts Festival, Bloomsbury Arts Festival in London and will be performing at SOIL Art Festival in the US in October this year. October at SOIL Art Gallery, USA.
Ig: Shuyi Gao (tender228_gao)
Artwork Review
This round of recruitment received a total of nine artists’ submissions for their performance programs. After the jury members ： Cang Xin, Tian Meng, Wen Peng, Yang Yuting, and Zhou Bin’s comments, they voted for the artists of this issue. We have invited the jury members to share their overall feelings about this review.
Cang Xin｜Artist
The overall appearance of this artist’s work is still relatively young! From the following aspects: 1:Unique corporeal feeling, which requires the spirit of sacrifice and experimental boldness. 2:The need to maintain a high degree of sensitivity and judgment to social issues. 3:Universal values presented in a personalized linguistic way in the narrative of the body community of the human society. This is the feeling of the selected works.
Tian Meng｜Director of Minimal Art Center, Co-founder/Advisor of Kinyue Children’s Museum
received the submission documents for the first phase of “Acting Out”. Contributors provided a brief introduction, past works, and a proposal for the current submission. Not only did they provide detailed implementation methods, environments and props used, many of them even gave a conceptual and systematic description of the program to be implemented, and even explained the symbolic meanings of the props and materials used in detail. It is not difficult to see the seriousness and rigor of their creations.
Wen Peng｜Artist
I was expecting to be a jury member this time, and after half a day’s serious reading, I was actually a little disappointed. Of course, I know that it is really difficult now. I also wanted to find a little possibility in the young people’s program. I can only choose what I am used to, I personally prefer one man’s theater, nonsense may be a bit interesting, such as Don Quixote, is a joke also has some power.
Yang Yuting｜A4 Documentation Center
The main considerations when submitting a work that you think is good are: 1) whether the artist’s impulse to express and desire to create is genuine and strong; 2) whether the content of the program can respond to the current social life; 3) whether the artist has a good ability to express and land from concept to performance; 4) whether the artist’s past experience provides the basis for this short-term residency to be extended, and whether the artist has the potential to stimulate more possibilities.
Zhou Bin｜Artist, Head of UP-ON Upward Bound Archives
Being a jury member is not politically correct, especially for a medium like performance art, which is inherently rebellious and deconstructive. The selection process is indispensable for the project, so I try to do two things in order to minimize regrets: firstly, to establish a good selection mechanism; secondly, to eliminate my own subjective bias as much as possible.
In the selection of works, I favor two considerations: first, the maturity and uniqueness of the work in terms of media language. I emphasize that what the work says (the theme) is important, but how it says it (the methodology) is more important; and secondly, the works that are applicable to the specificity and limitation of this project (the public space of the gallery with the presence of the audience).
