B.O.A.T
(Best of All Time)
An embodied project/a turbulent era of my life working across writing, photography, print & performance.
(Thanks to Bambi González and Fred Feng for shooting visuals and working on this project with me.)
*View this page on PC for a better visual experience.
An embodied project/a turbulent era of my life working across writing, photography, print & performance.
(Thanks to Bambi González and Fred Feng for shooting visuals and working on this project with me.)
*View this page on PC for a better visual experience.
No.0
writing
If I Need, I Can Pack My Life in a Box
Read Vol. 1: here
Read Vol. 2: here
This project began when I moved onto the boat and became a boater on the waterways.
I was flushed with new feelings around the change of my life and vision for my future as an queer artist and a diasporic sinophone.
I also got so tired of writing in Art English and I want to explore an alternative way of explaining my art to people.
So I decided to write, as raw and unfiltered as I could.
You will see some paragraphs from these two pieces on the rest of the page
They might not explain directly what you see, but I want you to know how I was feeling.
NO.1
Print
(special print on translucent acrylic in A4 size available)
(special print on translucent acrylic in A4 size available)
It’s been two months since I started living on this narrowboat.
As what we hold is a continuous cruising license, we are required to move along the canal every two weeks.
And so far, we’ve passed through Uxbridge, West Drayton, Perivale, Little Venice in Paddington, King’s Cross, Angel, Victoria Park, Mile End, and Limehouse.
Alun says that living on the boat makes him feel closer to people, rather than stuck in academia.
But for me, still estranged from this city, I am simply fascinated by the flowing landscapes along the canal.
Quite frankly speaking, after 5 months, sometimes I feel really stuck.
Boat admin can be tiring and my life is not organized enough.
I don’t like that I don’t have fixed address and I have to rely on friends or paid services to receive parcels.
I was really freaked out by the engine fire in November,
I was naked alone on the boat when the fire and smoke bursted from below my feet.
And Jesus Christ you have to try taking money out of these motherfucking insurance companies’ pocket.
We have been stuck in an area that I’m not a fan of since that.
And then last Saturday, I dropped my phone in the canal. I screamed,
and I was frozen there for 15 seconds.
My phone was like a butterfly, in a beautiful curve, flipping, diving and then gone for ever.
People always romanticize boat life and nomadism as a lifestyle that brings freedom and flees from structures.
But the more I live on the boat, the pain of it becomes more the pain in the ass.
I actually feel so relieved. I don’t have to self-castrate anymore because it’s finally easy enough for me to lash it all out.
It’s actually not so much of a resistance as you might think.
As what we hold is a continuous cruising license, we are required to move along the canal every two weeks.
And so far, we’ve passed through Uxbridge, West Drayton, Perivale, Little Venice in Paddington, King’s Cross, Angel, Victoria Park, Mile End, and Limehouse.
Alun says that living on the boat makes him feel closer to people, rather than stuck in academia.
But for me, still estranged from this city, I am simply fascinated by the flowing landscapes along the canal.
Quite frankly speaking, after 5 months, sometimes I feel really stuck.
Boat admin can be tiring and my life is not organized enough.
I don’t like that I don’t have fixed address and I have to rely on friends or paid services to receive parcels.
I was really freaked out by the engine fire in November,
I was naked alone on the boat when the fire and smoke bursted from below my feet.
And Jesus Christ you have to try taking money out of these motherfucking insurance companies’ pocket.
We have been stuck in an area that I’m not a fan of since that.
And then last Saturday, I dropped my phone in the canal. I screamed,
and I was frozen there for 15 seconds.
My phone was like a butterfly, in a beautiful curve, flipping, diving and then gone for ever.
People always romanticize boat life and nomadism as a lifestyle that brings freedom and flees from structures.
But the more I live on the boat, the pain of it becomes more the pain in the ass.
I actually feel so relieved. I don’t have to self-castrate anymore because it’s finally easy enough for me to lash it all out.
It’s actually not so much of a resistance as you might think.
No.2
Print
(special print on translucent acrylic in A4 size available)
(special print on translucent acrylic in A4 size available)
I know this sounds extreme, but sometimes these thoughts just come to me, and they scare me.
I’m not socially isolated in any practical sense, though I find myself consumed by conversations more and more frequently.
I still keep my eyes wide open, trying to find people with whom I share topics and energy.
AI tells me that this is healthy, that it means I’m building my own boundaries, learning to filter out conversations that don’t nourish me,
to stop consuming energy on surface-smoothness maintaining.
But I can’t help but doubt whether that also means I’m becoming indifferent to things.
I can barely tolerate any more small talk or normies.
I crave connection in every exchange — sex, art, collaboration, friendship, money.
I’m not socially isolated in any practical sense, though I find myself consumed by conversations more and more frequently.
I still keep my eyes wide open, trying to find people with whom I share topics and energy.
AI tells me that this is healthy, that it means I’m building my own boundaries, learning to filter out conversations that don’t nourish me,
to stop consuming energy on surface-smoothness maintaining.
But I can’t help but doubt whether that also means I’m becoming indifferent to things.
I can barely tolerate any more small talk or normies.
I crave connection in every exchange — sex, art, collaboration, friendship, money.
No.3
Print/ Self Portrait
(special print on translucent acrylic in A4 size available)
(special print on translucent acrylic in A4 size available)
I began to feel so confused.
Am I taking a rebellious position, cynically distancing myself from the system,
or a pragmatic survival strategy that’s only conforming?
As if I have lost my vitality and reduced to an angry machine that’s still functioning.
I didn’t want to burn for the system,
but I don’t know when intimacy has become the fuels to sustain this machine.
And dynamics are something that we can feel with our instincts.
I’m so exhausted of the game where we have to prove ourselves to be the more moral one in the relationship.
It’s the death sentence of love.
But we are in so much pain because we live in a post-moral world where this game happens everywhere.
I like my care-free self, I’m starting to get tired of making efforts to set boundaries and express my feelings and needs
because I just can’t monitor my own emotions 24/7. Why such a practice of intimacy always becomes an enduring in the end?
If the Others have not yet crossed the boundaries that I set,
then I have no valid reasons to validate my feelings.
If I have not yet clearly expressed my feelings,
I have no valid reasons to retrace and complain about the fact that they had been ignored.
Am I taking a rebellious position, cynically distancing myself from the system,
or a pragmatic survival strategy that’s only conforming?
As if I have lost my vitality and reduced to an angry machine that’s still functioning.
I didn’t want to burn for the system,
but I don’t know when intimacy has become the fuels to sustain this machine.
And dynamics are something that we can feel with our instincts.
I’m so exhausted of the game where we have to prove ourselves to be the more moral one in the relationship.
It’s the death sentence of love.
But we are in so much pain because we live in a post-moral world where this game happens everywhere.
I like my care-free self, I’m starting to get tired of making efforts to set boundaries and express my feelings and needs
because I just can’t monitor my own emotions 24/7. Why such a practice of intimacy always becomes an enduring in the end?
If the Others have not yet crossed the boundaries that I set,
then I have no valid reasons to validate my feelings.
If I have not yet clearly expressed my feelings,
I have no valid reasons to retrace and complain about the fact that they had been ignored.
No.4
Print
(available in A4/A3/A2 size)
(available in A4/A3/A2 size)
I think about myself carrying so much hope before leaving for London,
the shore I’ve been longing to reach, free of political depression, a brighter future awaiting.
I was loving and hating Beijing — loved its anger, hated its anger.
I met so many lovely and furious friends, had the purist support and love,
yet realized how elitist, exclusive, and toxic the progressive community could be.
And in an ocean of anger, we forgot to preserve the space for healing.
I still can’t help but think, if resistance means to kill our weaker self, what if only vulnerable are we born to be ?
I’ve also grown tired of explaining where I have come from.
I shut up about my experience within activism community in Beijing altho it was first interesting to my British friends.
Chinese activists aspire to freedom and democracy, because we cannot see inside the black box, because our voices have been suppressed for too long.
Western progressivists criticize capitalism, yet they are also too exhausted to explore ways of living beyond the neoliberal logic of productivity, competition,
and self-commodification. So they utopianise communism as if it were a romantic thing.
And isn’t it funny? Some people’s life struggles can be some others’ symbolic rhetoric.
Some’s institutional traumas can be some others’ anaesthetic fantasy.
East or West, what difference do we really have?
How essentially different is it to live in London or Beijing?
There is no real escape, only relocation, only the slight variation in the ripples created
when our existence collides with different corners of this immense system.
the shore I’ve been longing to reach, free of political depression, a brighter future awaiting.
I was loving and hating Beijing — loved its anger, hated its anger.
I met so many lovely and furious friends, had the purist support and love,
yet realized how elitist, exclusive, and toxic the progressive community could be.
And in an ocean of anger, we forgot to preserve the space for healing.
I still can’t help but think, if resistance means to kill our weaker self, what if only vulnerable are we born to be ?
I’ve also grown tired of explaining where I have come from.
I shut up about my experience within activism community in Beijing altho it was first interesting to my British friends.
Chinese activists aspire to freedom and democracy, because we cannot see inside the black box, because our voices have been suppressed for too long.
Western progressivists criticize capitalism, yet they are also too exhausted to explore ways of living beyond the neoliberal logic of productivity, competition,
and self-commodification. So they utopianise communism as if it were a romantic thing.
And isn’t it funny? Some people’s life struggles can be some others’ symbolic rhetoric.
Some’s institutional traumas can be some others’ anaesthetic fantasy.
East or West, what difference do we really have?
How essentially different is it to live in London or Beijing?
There is no real escape, only relocation, only the slight variation in the ripples created
when our existence collides with different corners of this immense system.
No.5
Performance
(20 min)
for Sediment Collective’s night of Vivid at Theatreship
reflecting on plasticness, performativity of alternativeness & intimacy
(20 min)
for Sediment Collective’s night of Vivid at Theatreship
reflecting on plasticness, performativity of alternativeness & intimacy
The world is so fucking big that we can never exhaust it.
I still believe in the vastness of life.
But I realize that I might wither within that kind of belief and lust:
the exact desire to break rules, to escape out of the box, the insistence that I must be unique, exceptional and spectacular.
We live in a post-alternative world, a world in which being “alternative” itself can become a set of performative duties.
I still believe I am on a path toward self-liberation.
And yet, deep within me, there remains a profound fear of being fetishized and categorized.
Sometimes it is exactly this fear that gives rise to my self-institutionalization and over-intellectualization,
which, for me, are far more terrifying than being categorized itself.
I’ve been asking some people and myself,
if self-liberation means endlessly killing weak parts of oneself,
what if we are just born vulnerable and fragile?
So what makes my life? Where is my world?
I pack my life into boxes again and again, like a lich hiding their phylactery.
I’m still alive, yet no one knows the reasons for me to be.
I still believe in the vastness of life.
But I realize that I might wither within that kind of belief and lust:
the exact desire to break rules, to escape out of the box, the insistence that I must be unique, exceptional and spectacular.
We live in a post-alternative world, a world in which being “alternative” itself can become a set of performative duties.
I still believe I am on a path toward self-liberation.
And yet, deep within me, there remains a profound fear of being fetishized and categorized.
Sometimes it is exactly this fear that gives rise to my self-institutionalization and over-intellectualization,
which, for me, are far more terrifying than being categorized itself.
I’ve been asking some people and myself,
if self-liberation means endlessly killing weak parts of oneself,
what if we are just born vulnerable and fragile?
So what makes my life? Where is my world?
I pack my life into boxes again and again, like a lich hiding their phylactery.
I’m still alive, yet no one knows the reasons for me to be.
Building the scene
*my little boat room
*me
So, I don’t mind packing my life into a little box and inhabiting chaos.
I gave up figuring out if this is a necessary strategy to survive, an aestheticised choice of lifestyles, or a performance of both.
I’m unapologetically a chaotic mixture of a series of influences and references.
Ambiguity and fluidity sometimes makes freedom.
My creative instincts will enlighten me to find the dynamic methodology to assemble myself
if my will can constantly engage with this fight with my inner chaos.
I’m my own divine intervention.
Although right now I can’t go anywhere I feel like going,
I’m my boat bedroom’s queen,
I listen to myself and I dream to be care-free.
I gave up figuring out if this is a necessary strategy to survive, an aestheticised choice of lifestyles, or a performance of both.
I’m unapologetically a chaotic mixture of a series of influences and references.
Ambiguity and fluidity sometimes makes freedom.
My creative instincts will enlighten me to find the dynamic methodology to assemble myself
if my will can constantly engage with this fight with my inner chaos.
I’m my own divine intervention.
Although right now I can’t go anywhere I feel like going,
I’m my boat bedroom’s queen,
I listen to myself and I dream to be care-free.
Extra
go-go dancing for Yard Yard Space x Pubis Project’s Tear Power Plant night at Dalston Den
(that was when the tape look idea was born)
with AC Dot Robot
(that was when the tape look idea was born)