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Helen Zhang

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

Writings

︎︎︎helenjiayuzhang@gmail.com ︎︎︎zhangjiayu0829@126.com
@helen_jzhang
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The Metaphor of Sand: Walking, Watching, and Witnessing

Installation/Video/Performance
18:02:00
Breathing, walking, watching, and touching are bodily actions that seem increasingly distant from our current life. Unconscious physical movements and unobserved fantasies are both intuitive and passively generated habitual ways of understanding the world. Through interaction with the world, we acquire knowledge and second-hand information.
Direct perception of the body is often overlooked, and the consciousness generated through physical observation is rarely emphasized. This exhibition provides clues for the body and mind to re-connect. Audiences’ physical manipulation and illusion in minds during the interaction within the space is the witness and definition of the artwork itself.
The sand, as a sculptural object, fills the space. As an interactive object within the space, its definition and context change based on the audience's experience. The stone symbolizes eternity, a magnified form of a grain of sand. It serves as a tool to draw, a chair, a sculpture, a ritual, an object imbued with human touch and cultural significance, or something that is undefined and beyond its original function.
The stone appears in the video across three sites: the beach, a construction site, and a stone bridge, connecting the objects within the space, thereby breaking the fourth wall.
Using the concept of "zero-degree art," the act of throwing symbolizes the intuitive understanding of one's actions, representing the process of self-understanding through primal impulses.
The audience's participation transforms the installation into a performance. The constant shift between the audience as performers and observers allows the project to explore the distance between the artwork and the viewer. The conscious illusions an
(sand)

Liquid sand
Solid but soft
Witness traces of passing
Grain of sand
Become clay when wet
Fragile but as a whole
Molded by hand

It is the stone symbolizing immortality
Shaped by wind
A ritual object when piled up
Stone thrown into water
Make ripples
Let the kids see themselves

Touch with the body
Feel with the mind
Physicality proves illusion or reality?

Sand is not only sand
Illusion within context
Defined by imagination
It is apostrophe
The bridge that connect our bodies with the mind and the world.


(digital screening of video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1psJHN-Dh2ie6ud3BqHoJvM5ZVqK2T9kW/view?usp=sharing)


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