The place the world accelerates, she slows us down—with intention, with breath.
In Comfortable Acts of Resistance, interdisciplinary artist Siyuan Meng presents a trilogy of works that cross screendance, images, and dwell efficiency—every tracing the sensing physique as a website of formality, notion, and quiet transformation. By means of minimalist gesture, elemental materials, and the aesthetics of slowness, Meng builds poetic areas that resist spectacle and invite presence.
The trilogy—Porous, Physique Journey, and Balcony Whispers—unfolds throughout mediums but stays rooted in a single creative inquiry: what does it imply to dwell within the physique, softly, in a time of structural acceleration?
In Porous, carried out on a drifting canal boat beneath the glass towers of East London, the performer strikes inside a skeletal shelter made from branches and gauze. Her gestures—leaning, folding, respiration—turn into a mushy interruption to the hardness of the city panorama. The efficiency is much less choreography than attunement: to water, to wind, to the silent nearness of strangers. Porosity turns into a political stance—a willingness to stay open in methods designed to harden us.
Physique Journey, a screendance movie, traverses inside and planetary landscapes. The digital camera follows the determine by means of rituals of repetition, strolling, and emotional resonance. Right here, embodiment just isn’t a set state however a fluid discipline of reminiscence and return. Drawing from Daoist non-duality and diasporic expertise, the work strikes past narrative into cycles of turning into.
Balcony Whispers, the ultimate and most intimate piece, is a photographic meditation on the female physique in stillness. Set within the liminal area of a balcony, a solitary determine—clothed in lace and shadow—engages in micro-rituals of relaxation and a spotlight. The pictures seize not efficiency, however listening. On this held area, stillness just isn’t passive—it breathes.
Throughout all three works, Meng proposes slowness as resistance. These usually are not spectacles to eat however areas to really feel by means of. In a world oversaturated with picture and urgency, Comfortable Acts of Resistance reminds us of the unconventional potential of pause, breath, and embodied care.
