The Engine of Kumquat Cadet, 2023
Installation and Performance (duration 25 min)
The full version of video and documentations available upon request
In collaboration with Harry Appleayrd and Nanzhen Yang
The performnace shown for ‘Fluid Cosmologies’ Part 2 at Forma Arts and Media, London
I wonder if you still wish for me not to be hurt.
I wonder why my deficitul, deceitful, maleficent urge hasn't gotten to you yet.
I wonder if you still have the same habit of tightening your holster with your left hand, only using two fingers, the image of that action is trapped in my hand too.
I wonder if you still sing the same song you sang when I pretended that I was asleep.
Why does thinking of it lessen the catastrophe even at this time when I am ending all things.
I am not there with you, I wish I could have stroked your scar.
Come here and answer back to me with your swiftful voice, is it late there?’ Once it was a book, one other time it was an ant. An automatic ancestry to autonomous misery.
Sometimes a lack of desire can crush you.
I desire to look at the palm of hand and my individual fingers, they are looking smaller than usual.
I was passing through a land nearby, and there was a river, so small it looked almost like a pond, a strangely long water point - grass everywhere in a cluster on its surface, I remember its gravitation. I imagined what would be behind those long grasses like a wall surrounding something hidden. I unravelled my scarf from the waist holder, I wrapped it around my hands to unblock grass in order for it not to sting me. I sensed it could even sting fibres of hair. And there was, there was that light, a sharp light more like a blinding energy, the shine sprung out of the left part, but dark and heavy, and… bright… it was so bright… I could not almost see myself. That thought I couldn’t shake from the moment I arrived there, how can something so sublime hurt? It was a different kind of sadness, I have never felt sadness in that way, I have never thought about sadness as a forceful energy, the overpowering exhaustion in everything I tethered to this land. Immediately I was trapped there, and I do not remember moving or stopping. I was too shocked even to cry, I felt too much to take the feeling that It struck me with, this… machine. There is no other way to describe it than it was a machine, if an antidote was a machine, it’d look like this. But an antidote of which form? It was not a sentient being, its vivid breathing, breathing out, spouting colours, the same as when the machine makes the noise when turned on, colours spitting like a dust, like pollen of flowers when coming out, waters that splash when the tides in, a flowing… the shape of a hand… or creature yet to keep-still that glass-like thick surface, screaming like a siren.
It was brightly lit when i got outside. Perhaps the machine decided sleep, and the thought of going back terrified me. To that flood...
