Transparent Phenomenon

Transparent Phenomenon is a special project of “Filter the Public,” the Shanghai World Financial Center’s fifth-anniversary art project. Presented as a new performance work on 25 October 2013, it combines live performance, installation, video, and photographs; the exhibition continued until 9 November 2013.

The work uses organic expressions of everyday body language in public space to build bodily interaction with viewers. When speech is abandoned, bodily vocabulary becomes the most primitive and direct means of communication.

Inside a two-metre transparent sphere, Xiao Ke rolls slowly. Shifts in time and space make this everyday bodily language unfamiliar, bringing theatrical ritual into public space. The sphere sets the body, audience, and environment in an ambiguous relation: visible to one another, yet separated. Writing inside and outside the sphere attempts to bridge that distance and the gaps of memory.

Zi Han records the reality and illusion of the situation from an observer’s perspective. Instant photographs add another spatial dimension, while two cameras reveal the internal and external details of the action.