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Floating Poetics, Wandering Mindscapes — the title of this performance alludes to the long history of literary and artistic gatherings. The famous gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, attended by forty-two scholars and literati—including the most renowned among them, Wang Xizhi (303–361)—took place during the Shangsi Festival. The participants engaged in a drinking game known as liushang (floating wine cups): cups filled with rice wine were set adrift along a winding stream while the participants sat waiting on either bank. Whenever a cup came to rest, the person nearest to it was required to drink the wine in a single draught and compose a poem. In the end, twenty-six participants created a total of thirty-seven poems.
Inspired by this historic poetic gathering and by a longing for a utopian garden community, Chang Ya-Hung’s performance probes the moment of creating an indivisible space in which his painterly actions lead us toward a mysterious union with the very essence of being itself. His poetic imagination, carrying a fleeting sense of clarity, dwells within our elusive existence. Through collaboration with the music of Isang Yun, Chang’s performance allows us to experience firsthand the constitutive phenomenon of the Orchid Pavilion garden—in its indivisible wholeness, its state of non-differentiation, its mutual interpenetration, and its continual flow and transformation.
– Manu Park