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Helen Zhang

  1. World Body Mind
  2. The Unfamiliar Body
  3. En dedans-Giselle
  4. Future Unknown Exhibition
  5. Graphing Ballet
  6. Improvising Ballet
  7. The Empty “pagex”
  8. Sip
  9. L-L
  10. Don’t Touch My Body

Writings

︎︎︎helenjiayuzhang@gmail.com ︎︎︎zhangjiayu0829@126.com
@helen_jzhang
are.na/helen-zhang/my-fooood

World Body Mind 

Book/Text/Performance
10in*13.7in print
This bilingual typesetting book is a collection of self-directed and self-produced image poems. It annotates Descartes’ mind-body problem from an artistic view. The book is divided into three chapters, each is an interpretation of dualism, physicalism, and idealism, gray, black, and white. In the virtual digital age, it evokes the definition and irreplaceability of the body and soul in the world. We use our bodies to speak of the "same". Content including literature, self-written poetry, choreography, and interlaced videography.
One world, different bodies, different souls. By removing punctuations, quoted text is presented with a grey stroking to preserve rhythms of the page. Combinations of hollow dots represent eight beats, hand punched. The rhythmic change is also the structure that ties the book together.
Grey (World): Life and death that all things experience. Modern dance choreography with song lyric from suicide line “18002738255” by Logic narrate a depressed girl suiciding at home using a hanger.
Black (body): The repetitive cycle of tying hair, including systematic ballet steps and shadows of the movements visualize the controlled body. The text includes Dunbar's famous literary poem, We Wear Masks and self-written poetry.
White (mind): Consciousness taking over. Using a paralyzed writer Tiesheng Shi’s literature, first stream of consciousness writing The Yellow Wallpaper, interview from Parkinson patient, and movement of eyeball reflecting the complexity of mind and inner consciousness.


(Multiple worlds, Multiple bodies, Multiple souls)

There is dim light on the side,
in the dusk.
I run through the monster’s eye,
In the dark.
I called the sound inside my torso,
A crap.
Storm with extreme heat run down from the head,
Liquid iron.
Shaking for useless revenge and fall again,
Red in the broken glass.
Shinning from the ground,
Reflecting moonlight.
It doesn’t belong to me,
Beneath myself,
Is the shade.
Above myself,
Is the light.
It doesn’t belong to me.
Smoke surrounding,
They came for kids who don’t go to sleep.
I know my eyes are closed,
Laying down.
Not on a bed, nor a carpet,
I am on wounds.


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