Wenzhu Song is a young artist born and raised in China, having moved around a lot since a young age, space has become a source of sensitivity and creative inspiration, and the body, as the only medium she can carry with herself, has become the most intuitive and honest material for documenting. Her focus lies in constructing specific spaces to showcase raw bodily expressions, rendering vulnerability and exposure in intimate scenarios such as sleep, tears, and confrontations.
She expresses herself through various mediums like body art, painting, sound, video, and sculpture, choosing based on their feelings at the moment. During her stay, she worked on multiple performances and video pieces, which will be completed over the coming months.
"A fight will never end" is an improvisation piece where Wenzhu collaborated with the beautiful mover Ehsan Ghoreishi to express an awareness of the "fight" directly through their body language. Directly through the body in a particular context, they explored how improvisation can alter the relationship and energy between characters. The body encompasses our different life experiences and ways of thinking, and in this scene the performers are in a constant state of transformation. They have different perceptions of the same scene, meaning the fight is always in a state of unresolved tension.
In “Eggplant Mountain”, Wenzhu explored how people can turn magical contingency into a heavy burden due to obsession with material matters and how they perform farewell rituals.
“When this giant mountain of eggplants was presented to me in the form of a half-rotted pile, a welcome and a farewell ceremony were taking place at the same time. I tried to preserve and save these discarded eggplants by eating them, collecting their skins, and performing on them. Physical material will eventually dissolve, and the obsession can only be transformed through the moving body. A farewell requires a ritual.
By performing with the stunning creature Ehsan Ghoreishi, who appeared as an observer in the form of a "bird", accompanied by an absent and distant presence, I eventually let go of the rotting eggplants and left them there.”
