Her pursuits are rooted in the interconnected principles of the collective consciousness. With a profound belief in the moral responsibility of examining the self/universe, she channels her creative energies toward building bridges between individual narratives and the universe.
Her pursuits are rooted in the interconnected principles of the collective consciousness. With a profound belief in the moral responsibility of examining the self/universe, she channels her creative energies toward building bridges between individual narratives and the universe.
Performance Art
The markings ritualized onto Ngu and Pan’s bodies are designed and placed by Chen as an offering of witness, sisterhood, and accompaniment through the terror and joy of our unfolding humanity: such marks make an entrance into the energetic matrix of the body through key meridian points, engaging generational, ancestral, and personal histories to offer a gateway of insight, an opening for release, and a site for the continued metabolism of that which each performer’s life works at and works through.
Alongside video and sensory elements, the performance centers on the transcendent power of bodywork and metaphysical pain. Through immersion in a collective, spontaneous, and reflexive choreography; in space made thick with smoke; and in time made gummy, dense, the amber moment of performance invites the performers and audience alike into a communal hum of discomfort and awakening. The act of witnessing pain has become synonymous with a passive engagement in an optics of suffering that exploits the body. Here, viewers are invited into co-constituting a ritual space alongside the performers, an alchemy of mutual flesh witness that opens space not only to watch the performers but also to witness oneself–the pain, latent and endemic, we each carry in our own bodies. All this unfolds in a protected space of communion created by the lending of bodies unto one another.