Liminal Wild: live

2023

performancemusicimage research

The research focuses on bats (in the coronavirus crisis) and sparrows (in the “eradicate 4 pests” hygiene campaign in China’s Great Leap Forward) as carriers of symbolism and materials for personification in relation to political narratives in national health agenda, and how it reflects our understanding of ecology and immunity. The outcome is a performance combining music, spoken words, singing (rap) and movements encrypting the research outcomes and using human bodies as sites for metaphors to reenact the bodies of bats. Once a villainized creature, this bat has become a role model, a pop star, and a spokesman of our ecological and political emergencies.

In the post-Covidian times when we have moved on from the pandemic, we should still think about the conflicts the pandemic had directed us to and left us in: conflicts between nation state and people; between countries; and between ideologies. Certain narratives are created to serve people’s need for an enemy. In this work, through embodying bats and sparrows, I found a good entry to the political engagement as an artist and researcher. These species provide materials to understand the causes, potentials, dangers, and damages of the hero-villain narratives. And they are the new materials which host resistance of a divided society and the lurking autocracy. The body of the bat, the place embedding so much about liminality, is where we find resolutions to the increasingly polarised world.