LEIMAY, HERE Arts Center ⦂⦂ A Meal Premiere

...interrogates our “post-industrial relationship with food” through a series of allegorical vignettes and a four-course ritual dinner./ Costumes for the Mainstage performances summon mythological creatures and draw on pre-Columbian regalia and pleated Shintō vestments, enveloping performers in mythical forms and ancestral memories...

Powerhouse Arts ⦂⦂ When the Moon

Waxes Red

...takes its title from the titular phrase in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s 1991 text, describing an interval, a threshold where shifting ways of representing marginalized subjects converge—at once calamitous and foreboding and luminous and liberatory./ In the renewed terrain of struggle and of deterritorialized subjectivities, no moon-lovers can really claim possession of the soft light that illuminates towns, villages, forests, and fields…The one moon is seen in all waters; and the many-one moon is enjoyed or bawled at on a quiet night by people everywhere—possessors and dispossessed.¹/ This collection of garments speaks to this interval of waxing red, of deterritorialization, of shuttling in-between, of hyphenated realities in colonial peripheries, like swelling crescents and yearning and heaving limbs, like masts of restless ships...

Ch’onhado (all under heaven)

...spans a 23-foot scroll, superimposing personal garment diagrams with Korean historiographies./ Photographs of anti-trusteeship arson attacks from the Kyunghyang Shinmun archives; colonial religious scholarship by Swedish, Australian, and American missionaries; Joseon geobukseon warships; silk paintings of retreating intruders; mythical sino-centric maps; haenyeo divers and dockworkers; textures of dried anchovies, netted shadows./ These are porous histories, mirrored and spliced and multiplied. The pattern is defined. Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.¹ Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned²...

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patternbook

patternbook jido

...compiles 13 double-sided images, exploring obsession through local and transnational cartography./ On facing pages are personal close-up photographs of pavement markings and garment tracings, penciled on alphanumeric paper and chalked on fabric. On the opposite sides are reproductions of appropriated colonial paraphernalia: American military occupation maps, triangulation nets from the Japanese Imperial Land Survey, and advertisement pamphlets disseminated by the Japanese Tourist Bureau./ In xian-zhuang pocket binding style, pages are folded in half, their centerfolds forming the right-hand edges of the book. Raw edges are joined along the spine, creating enclosed pockets that hide the backs of the double-sided photographs, concealing the colonial propaganda./ But this alternate history, act of concealment and forced illegibility, parallels the ways in which personal garments, public crosswalks, and global borders are mapped—engaged in bodily, spatial and geopolitical relations that are intimate, imposed and arbitrary...

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The street of crocodiles

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Conical intersect

Minor rage

On shattering vessels

Femminilità dentata

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