After You'd Gone

I am interested in various forms of loss and its following internal phenomena of mourning and melancholia. The works presented here belong to my studio project After You’d Gone, which consists of text-based performances and video installations. The component works are informed by my personal memory and collective experience in regard to bereavement, death and disaster. This project couples live and recorded performances in video and sound installations in order to engage with the integration of the enduring virtual body and the transient corporal body. By doing so, I intend to metaphorically form an interwoven relationship between the past and the present, the other and the self, corresponding to the prolonged psychic existence of the lost object during melancholia. I also focus on exploring the performativity of performance documentation under the categories of ‘the documentary’ and ‘the theatrical’. Language, spoken narrative and shared listening are crucial in my works. I use personal stories and historical documents as raw material for the performed texts. I propose articulating such texts to be an ephemeral approach to reconnect with the past. I’m also interested in the performative elements in language. Fragmenting, stuttering and repetition are tactics I often use in my spoken-word performances. Impediments to language embody the struggle of the present lingering within the past, in the same way melancholia keeps the other and the past alive in the present.

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I don’t see, I don’t remember, I don’t mourn, 2019  
live performance, video installation

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1957, 2019  
two-channel video

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Next Travel will be to See You Again, 2020  
video installation

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Next Travel will be to See You Again, 2020  
video installation

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Calling for Zhao Nian, 2021  
performance  

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Ghosts in your life, 2021  
performance

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