Exhibition Texts by Qian Yang
My home is inaccessible, the path covers with deep snow.
After missing the first train home, I missed four flights in succession.
Due to the current, the flight was canceled.
Rushed to the gate, but I missed the flight check in.
I slept at the airport thinking that I was closer, but on the contrary, I were further away.
Finished checking in, when I arrived at the boarding gate, the jet bridge was just retracted.
It was amid this constant misses that I wrote the foreword at the airport, trying to dash off to complete the exhibition and the theater.
And thus I farewell to Shanghai and flow with the rhythm of Missing Home. What have caused the misses all the way? What are missed? Where do people meet, and meet again?
———
As time flows on, the configuration of gazes changes with the manner of modernity (Boris: 2016). Museums and galleries have immersed in the flow of time, inviting the viewer to enter an ephemeral time zone for an overnight event, rather than a temporary exhibition that lasts for a whole month. A stage transforms permanent collections for changing curatorial projects, guided tours, screenings, lectures, and performances. Thus, “the curatorial” is no longer seen as a still point to frame an exhibition as its final destination, but rolling into various events that showcases how a show is processed.
———
Rarely do I dream at night.
Words drift down and gradually disperse like dreamy murmurs.
In dream, a fishing net spills a half and keeps the other half. And if you can still capture it the next day after waking up, then it is your poem.
The species are defined by the grammatical gender of words, just like spaces.
My gaze upon spaces is physical. I watch how its bones, meridians and flesh grow in an abstract way and are choreographed concretely.
Just like sculpture.
In the theater, time just starts but never ends. If time is four-dimensional, can it rotate in an aisle?
Is there an aisle between the past and the future?
We stop our footsteps and traces when chasing the light.
We stream through time and become infinitely small.
Pond of water gurgles,
As it wears off along the winter’ surture.
The rain falls relentlessly in my home.
Dripping down beehives.
Butterfly passes through the aisle.
Dismantle —
Almost on the same day,
Down falls the snow and rain.
Snowflakes adrift in summer breeze,
While blood floats in winter air,
Snow is abreast with blood.
Pedestrians walk by one and two,
On the trail of Lu You,
Into the missing home of the poet.
There is a door — open,
The poet rotates with tourists
All the way to the steeple.
Dream,
Circuit discernment — until salt,
Slowly falls down.
Seal the throat
Seal the clavicle, and scapula
Seal the spine
Seal the ligament, and kneecap
Seal the heel.
Seal villages and plains
Seal rivers and mountains
Seal watermelons
Seal tomatoes
Seal lotus roots, and dragon fruits
Seal the dusk
Seal the night
Seal the sunrise
Elevator goes up and down.
IV.
Terrorist attacks ascend from the skyline,
Undoubtedly.
Terrorism is a theatre. It needs global audience before it commences.
The attack on the Pentagon was elaborately designed for American and global audience, and there was no chance for rehearsal or installation.
Here, the elevating stage is displaced for global live satellite broadcast, hidden in the family cinema.
For dancers, movements are a series of physical falls driven by time and space,
To attune their sensibility to subtler movements.
I always get lost in the aisle.
The standstill and suspension got my body into subtler thinking:
What is a leap, what is a fall, and what pulls us back.
Body has the resilience to recover, and return to where it was before the fall.
Heart is able to recover, so can she.
I am fascinated by the fall itself.
