At Or Gallery, guests enter either alone or with someone familiar, not with strangers. The speculative spa is unfolds throughout Or Gallery, entering through the storefront bookshop via the curtained ring where you change into slippers, continuing through the in-between passageway, into the exhibition space.

Throughout the experience, your attention is drawn to your relationship to the ground through various sensorial modes: the changing textures from concrete, into woven straw, and cedar chips.

Speculating through the spa, the exhibition also invited different modes of responding. These include writings by undergraduate student Daisy Kim, architecture scholar Christy Pearson, and dancer Kristen Lewis, which can be found here.

I engaged with Vancouver-based Chinese-Malaysian dance and martial artist Lee Su-Feh through long-distance conversations throughout the artistic research process. During the exhibition, Lee Su-Feh created a quiet performance that responded to and with the space, which was witnessed without spectacle in keeping with the intimate interiority of the experience.

Inquiring after the experience of scent, as a duration of time and space, the speculative spa features various scent gestures that engage the visitor: the touch of warm stones as they cool, the brush of eucalyptus branches, the fading aroma of oranges as you peel them.

I collaborated with Gina Badger, a herbologist, and Megan Hepburn, a parfumière, to create a menu of scent gestures that could be experienced over the course of the exhibition. These include incense, oil blends, botanical rubbings, smoke and steam.

Wave hands, like clouds, not eyes invites guests to enter constellation of haptic encounters that transpose the internal processes of taijiquan. Conceived as a “speculative spa”, the spatial narrative alludes to the transformational interplay of opposing forces experienced through martial arts practice. 

Immersive installation with sound, lighting, scents, sculpture, fountain, curtains, eucalyptus and cedar, ice tea boxes, slippers, straw mats, 

scents, performance

Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

Autumn 2021

Curated by Denise Ryner

I was interested in playing with resonance and spontaneity in the sonic register, by experimenting with the ancient Chinese instrument guqin 古琴, and layering recordings that interweave with reversed tracks. These sounds are in turn layered with the running water of a fountain, which I constructed out of a malleable mylar in the shape of a mountain.