“是身如电（Leaking Frontier）”，呈现生活、工作于香港和伦敦的艺术家文美桃的最新雕塑装置。此系列创作与舞者、表演艺术家Jamal Sterrett、Woo Yat-hei、Ching Chu、Jenny Yau合作，将在场的身体凝结为诸多一霎的定格。这些在事物、空间、动作与故事的历史中创造的静止，隐含着逃出意识的对身体的想象和理解，是由打断主体的时间尘埃形成的自主边界。此项目由策展人唐一菲策划。
“是身如电，念念不住”来自《维摩诘经》，意指事物的身体-即物质实体一直在流转之中，层出不穷。在美桃的创作过程中，首先是身体现场，艺术家与舞者在专注空间中问答，舞者及时反应探索的特定动作，是这种流转的当下时态。生成与消逝同时在场，动作落成之时，边界也形成了。有时身体会直接给出答案，有时语言附着于身体，有时无法言说的限度由身体尺度促成，身体成为探测认知的雷达、表现的容器。而当美桃记录和扫描这些姿势时，电子仪器的疏密以及延迟将这些流转拉入一种观测的维度，此时的时间颗粒排布于身体之上，可能错位的连接、残缺的局部、重复的末端、破裂的边缘重新组合出新的身体。美桃将这些电子的、赛博的身体在屏幕里排列、截取、生长、嫁接，消解了之前的边界并转换融合为新的形态。但他们将不再以疑似模具的身体出现，重新退回有机的、带有自然纹理的木质雕塑。美桃结合木材本身的脉路、结疤，呼应于身体躯干的骨相、拐点、经韧等，雕刻细节和末梢，将微妙的颜料铺陈，肌肤表层时而是被遮蔽的，时而透出原本木色。如同身体的一些临界时刻，用力时青筋暴起、拉伸时关节外翻……将不可见的体内反应、神经端的刺激化为可感知共情的颤栗。
身体作为社会文化构建的微观机制，对身体的理解和想象同时也关乎个体的政治情感表达。舞者们的身体是经过训练的身体，动作承载的时间性和历史性是身体记忆的归档与重演，是长久的身心规训与审美意识形态。而将动作从完整的事件中抽离出来时，它所承载的意义产生了拉扯，成为了一个反结构的仪式——脆弱、淤青、扭曲、痛觉等成为生命力开合的标记，反而弥散出诗意的潜在想象可能，比拟一把竖琴的撕扯、一束脱壳的花的呐喊……在肉体层面上，这些混乱与秩序、兽性与优雅、外在的失灵感与内在的超验互相吞噬，更诚实地袒露给世界。如同Yvonne Rainer所称“心灵是肌肉”(The Mind is a Muscle)，身体的尺度和张力不仅体现了思想，还在实践和塑造思想。这些感知与知识、意义建构以及权力关系的流转，勾勒了意识脱臼于身体，或身体行动在意识之前的空间。
‘Leaking Frontier’, featuring the latest sculptures and installations by Hong Kong and London-based artist Man Mei-To. In collaboration with dancers and performance artists Jamal Sterrett, Woo Yat-Hei, Ching Chu, and Jenny Yau, this series of works captures the bodies present in various fleeting moments. These stillnesses, created in the history of things, spaces, movements, and narratives, imply an escape in consciousness from imagination and interpretation of the body, an autonomous boundary established by the fragments of time that interrupt the subject. This project is curated by Tang Yifei.
The Chinese exhibition title translated to ‘this body is like lightning, barely lasting from moment to moment’ derives from the Vimalakirti Sutra, signifying that the body of things – the material entity – is always in flux and emerges in an endless profusion. Man’s creative process begins with a bodily site, where the artist and the dancer engage in a dialogue in the dedicated space, in which the dancer’s specific movements to promptly respond and explore become the present tense of such flux. In the simultaneous presence of emergence and dissipation, when movements are executed, boundaries are also established. Sometimes the body presents a direct answer; sometimes it is accompanied by language; sometimes the scale of the body mediates the limits of the inexplicable, and the body serves as a radar for detecting perception, a vessel for representation. As Man documents and scans these postures, the rarefication and delay from the electronic devices introduce these flux to a context of observation, when particles of time are arranged over the body, and potentially dislocated connections, mutilated parts, recurring ends, and ruptured edges reassemble to form a new body. Man arranges, captures, grafts, and grows these electronic, cyber bodies in the screen, dissolving previous boundaries, transforming and synthesising them into new formations. However, they no longer appear as suspiciously moulded bodies, returning to organic wooden sculptures with natural texture. Combining the veins and scars of the wood, in response to the skeletal structure, joints, and meridians of the torso, Man sculpts out the details and endings, applying subtle layers of paint, while the surface of the skin is sometimes concealed, and at other times revealing the original tone of the wood. Like some critical moments of the body – the bulging veins when exerting force, and the everting joints during stretching – transform the imperceptible internal reactions and the stimulation of the nerve endings into a shiver of perceptible empathy.
Understanding and imagining the body as a micro-mechanism of social and cultural construction is, at the same time, relevant to the individual’s political emotional expression. The dancers’ bodies are trained bodies, where the temporality and history of movement serve as an archive and re-enactment of bodily memories, enduring physical and mental disciplines and aesthetic ideologies. And when the movement is removed from the complete event, the significance it contains creates tension and becomes an anti-structural ritual – fragility, bruises, distortion, and pain, etc., become the symbols of the flux of life, and instead expands a poetic potential for imagination and possibilities, like the twisting of a harp or the shouts of a bouquet of shedding flowers… On a physical level, these chaos and order, brutality and elegance, external dissonance and internal transcendence consume each other to reveal themselves more honestly to the world. As Yvonne Rainer summarised, ‘the mind is a muscle’, the scale and tension of the body not only embody but also practice and shape ideas. The flux of these perceptions and knowledge, the construction of significance, and power relations delineate the space where consciousness is dislocated from the body, or where the body acts in advance of consciousness.