Playing the Mountain is a constellation of forms that play with balance, not as a final state to achieve, but a continuous interplay of opposing forces. My research emerges from practicing 太極拳 taijiquan, an internal martial art developed in China several hundred years ago for both defense and nourishment that integrates combat techniques with 氣 qi, ‘vital energy’ cultivation breathing-movements. I practice taijiquan as aesthetic inquiry: a way of forming questions through the whole sensorium. 

Taijiquan is a continuous shifting of balance — the interplay of emptiness and fullness. Balance is thus not a static equilibrium but the dynamic, generative tension between opposing forces within an ongoing process of composing and un-composing.

Starting from embodied practice and materializing as an installation in a gallery, Playing the Mountain deploys a range of artistic strategies to ask: how might I translate internal processes of qi circulation into external experiences to be shared with others, drawing out connections from the personal to the planetary? 

I translate balance into registers of movement, image, space, and sound: in the kite as a relation of gravity, wind, the string held in hand; in the geological processes of mountain sinkholes; in the gestures and graphics of Chinese writing; and in listening to ‘shadow’ sound. These translations explore embodied understandings of agency, presence, tension and resistance, finding different ways to ask: what are the implications of understanding balance, not as a state, but as a process? 

In the gallery, there are moving images illuminating the walls, the shadows cast by a sprawling, sinuous bamboo and a paper mobile, a collection and a polyphony of voices, scripts and accents. Not quite art objects nor documents, Playing the Mountain’s elements are perhaps glimpses of processes gathered in a constellation that invites an indirect, meandering way of ‘reading across’. This reading across of various aesthetic forms invites different ways to make sense of balance — in particular, through Chinese writing. As with taijiquan, calligraphy is a movement practice that coheres graphically from the dynamic tension of opposites, or as Yen Yuehping writes: ‘It’s the balance between balance and imbalance’ (2005).

When Canadian artist and filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan first invited me to work on an exhibition, I shared threads of my artistic research with her, which she could relate to easily having also practiced Chen style taijiquan. Playing the Mountain emerges from a conversation with Lesley that has been evolving since 2006, a dialogue that unfolds through various forms of collaboration — here, with Lesley as curator. This dialogue is imprinted with our shared experiences of growing up in southern Ontario as Cantonese diaspora, our aesthetic thinking moulded by and in resistance to the supposed neutrality of a White settler-colonial mainstream. In this case, balance and its tensions of empty-full, movement-stillness that we explore in Playing the Mountain both are and are not culturally-specific. The question emerges: how to find a language for that which is and is not culturally-specific?

With Lesley’s curatorial support, I could test out and frame the questions in a language that emerges from our diasporic positionality — a language that contests the privileging of transparency and articulability, and gravitates towards the unspoken, inferred, and indirect. This extends my artistic research methodology as a relational framework wherein ‘doing things together’ is a way of formulating questions. Doing things together is an indirect way of inquiring — it belies the linearity of research driven by hypothesis towards results. Indirectness offers what Sara Ahmed describes as a queer orientation, or dis-orientation: ‘a becoming that is once interior and exterior, as that which is given, or as that which gives what is given its new angle’ (2006). While doing things together, stories emerge indirectly — with or without words — connecting practice to histories and systems of thought.

Understanding taijiquan as a method of practice-based research, this form invites a different way of reading research: knowledge is never total nor complete because, as a practice of qi cultivation, it is an ongoing process of inquiry. Thus, rather than formulating a goal and a conclusion for the research, Playing the Mountain deploys this process-based approach of taijiquan to ask: how else might we pose our questions?

A classic teaching of taijiquan goes: ‘Be as still as a mountain, move like a great river’ (Wu 1812-1880, 1979: 54). From this seemingly simple invocation, one learns to embody simultaneously the principles of stability and fluidity as a constant process of noticing and adjusting. Like taijiquan, in 山水畫 shanshui hua, ‘Chinese landscape painting,’ the mountains and waters imbue the interplay of movement and stillness, emptiness and fullness. Painting is a process of enacting rather than representing the multitude of dynamic tensions.

Following this processuality, Playing the Mountain was inspired by a story in the Chinese classic of daoist thinking — 莊子 Zhuangzi — from the Warring States period (Zhuangzi 350-250 BCE). The story describes the sound that emerges when wind interacts with the mountain. Here, philosophy unfolds as an allusive image rather than an argued logic: in rhythmic incantation, Zhuangzi describes sound as the interplay of gentle breezes and blustering gusts with trees, puddles, hollows, bluffs, cavities, nostrils and apertures. In this concert of encounters, the philosophical question is posed as: ‘who does the playing’, but one can infer from the impossible ‘who’ that Zhuangzi rather asks: ‘how is the playing?’ Instead of seeking an author, to ask how undoes the causal relation that would ascribe agency to a ‘player’ and thus to hear the mountain as a polyphonic process of forces interacting.

How might we attend to this dynamic interplay through aesthetic strategies? I’ve thought of how artists have worked with these forces: the forbidding presence of wind in Aziz Hazara’s video and sound installation, Bow Echo (2019), showing five boys signaling with kazoos, while braving fierce hilltop winds in Kabul province. Or the spontaneous visualization that Rikuo Ueda channels, in his Wind Drawings (1999-2013), by affixing a pen to a tree branch hanging over a blank page and letting the wind do the drawing. I wondered how the playing takes shape; I thought of kites and how they invite a practice of de-centring one’s agency through a tangible interaction with unseen forces.

Early written accounts of kites dating to the Han dynasty describe simple constructions of silk and bamboo, flown by Chinese militaries to measure distance, sense wind direction and carry messages. During the COVID lockdown, I took to flying a kite on the island of Vienna’s Danube River, echoing my mum’s kite-flying on Toronto’s east-end beach. Her kite was like a stingray, pliable and foldable, whereas mine was more of a hawk and required assembling a spine before flying. I was drawn to how a body-less breath animates a flat thing; how a kite must be both light and obstructive to fly; how resistance allows movement. In taijiquan, this kind of dynamic resistance is 掤 peng ‘empty fullness’. One learns to move with peng as a form of support, like a buoyancy that keeps one’s structure from collapsing — one can find peng in the curve of a sail filled with wind or the bounce of a balloon when prodded.

In building the kites, I was drawn to the familiar materiality of bamboo and fabric: the qualities of lightness and pliability and soft yet firm resistance that echo peng. I had been thinking of lantern and kite construction, and also the lion heads that are used in ceremonial dance, made from intricate frames of bamboo and brightly painted paper and fabric. I was also influenced by the forms of wapepe or ‘stick charts’ used in Indigenous Polynesian sailing practices around what are now called the Marshall Islands (Genz and others 2009). These tools are crafted with coconut palm ribs and pandanus roots and used to teach navigation according to wave transformation. For generations, sailors have traversed the Pacific by studying wave patterns memorized from the stick charts and felt through the boat’s hull. If this diagram hints at patterns in a visual key, the meaning must be discerned with the whole body: sailors lie down and learn to read the different wave rhythms through their backs. Like kites, wapepe indicate a way of reading the interplay of forces within which we humans operate. One reads through a generative resistance — the push of wind or water against one’s own gravity. It is a way of reading by moving with, noticing changes and shifting in response. As with taijiquan, sometimes the shift is not visible, but felt inside — indeed, blurring the distinction between inside and outside.

Following this sense of empty fullness, I wanted to make kites that visitors could take out and fly, like a library operating out of the gallery, facilitated with a sign-out sheet and trust. The kites hung in the gallery not as untouchable objects but as an invitation to be animated. Like the spontaneity of a breeze, I wanted to leave an opening for the kite library to transform into relations that were beyond my initial devising. One kite went to New York State. One kite went to a local kindergarten class whose teacher had borrowed it for her students as the basis for a range of experiments in observing, creating, testing, and working together through their own kite-making. Of particular delight was the letter that arrived for me from the class, after the exhibition had wrapped up.

On the gallery wall, there is an invitation to visitors to make use of the kite library; it also suggests that any broken kites can be repaired by the borrower, without fixating on a ‘proper’ kite, and ‘proper’ flying. Seeking to destabilize the symmetry of proper kites, I transposed this research into a workshop in collective kite-making. Floating Resistance took place in July 2024 in Warsaw, Poland, at the invitation of Work Hard! Play Hard!, an artist platform that began in 2016 in a post-Soviet context. The participants were artists, activists, researchers and cultural workers, and we were invited to respond to questions of solidarity and de-centring at the intersection of art and politics. The workshop took place at the Roma Community Centre, followed by a (windless) session on the banks of the Vistula River.

During the workshop, I shared my research on how balance operates in martial arts, in the context of yinyang transdualism — how you can feel this balance when resisting and yielding to your opponent, whereby peng empty fullness keeps you from collapsing. Like a balloon being prodded, its tendency is to absorb some of the prod and shift around that point, moving its centre in relation. This echoes what Erin Manning (2009: 30) and Andre Lepecki have theorized as ‘leadingfollowing’:

Here, leading does not emerge as force of unidirectional authority, or of command, tied to an identifiable person-author-leader; just as following does not emerge as merely reactive and servile behavior. Rather, in their true choreo-political nature both become intertwined forces jointly affirming that apersonal singularity or event that we could name leadingfollowing or simply: a dancing that initiates. Dancing, one engages by constantly taking the initiative to fuse and to confuse lines of authority and of submission. Engaged, dancing becomes the act of fabricating permanent diffusions of leading positions and following positions – thanks to a constant weaving of disparate and endless lines of initiatives and counter-initiatives. (Lepecki 2013: 34-5).

Returning to Zhuangzi, I wanted to play with the polyphonic mountain in the register of performance, as an aleatoric choral reading exercise. Drawing on my background in musical performance, I experimented with shifting the focus from producing sound to listening to one another. A kind of play that differs from reading, opened up by the possibility of whistling, whispering, speaking under and over one another, without a clear conductor. I had thought of how artists have deployed the breadth and depth of collective breath: the spontaneous vocal intonations that emerge from the performance by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Sitting on a Man´s Head (2020), wherein performers and audience members enter a space of slow walking and spontaneous choral intonations. I think now of the vocal performance by Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian, Nothing Will Remain other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World (2025), that tracks the sonic effects of genocidal warfare and collective survival through the throat, channeling gasps, words, purrs, and chokes.

In late 2020, I translated Zhuangzi’s story as Playing the Mountain and engaged my colleagues in performing a choral reading as a collective presentation for EARN (Lee and others January 2021). This was in the midst of COVID, and I was interested in playing with the Zoom grid format. I wondered how we could interpret this old story in a time when being together was complicated by the dangers of breathing. Working with the in-between of online space, I wondered: how might we listen across distance? How might we read the story by enacting the interplay of wind and mountain, by listening for the plural and spontaneous? From our separate screens, an energy emerged from those sessions of rehearsing Playing the Mountain for the online presentation. Rehearsing in this distanced framework, the process of testing out different ways of listening while responding to one another’s breaths and utterances allowed us to shift our focus to doing something together and how this performs inquiry. Through reading and listening, we shared a commitment to a momentary polyphonic whole.

In 2023, I returned to Zhuangzi’s story and this process by inviting two colleagues to read with me, Masimba Hwati, an artist from Zimbabwe working in sound and sculpture and Hyo Lee, a performance and media artist from South Korea. This time, we would record the reading in person, as a video voiceover. At my kitchen table, while eating a sinkhole-shaped cake, we improvised in ways that had not been possible with the bigger group, relying even less on direction and more on playful intuition. The three of us are versed in performing in different ways, which means we each have a honed sense of how to listen and respond particular to these different contexts. Drawing on our respective experiences, we played off each other in the reading, in the moment. Our whispering, whistling, pacing, describe an unspoken agreement of leaving moments open, joining one another in fugal counterpoint, wherein we shift who is leading, who is following at any given moment. What is later heard in the video is a layering of our recordings, an artifact or glimpse of the energy that emerged from our shared listening.

Chinese writing is read not only for semantic meaning, but for a sense of gestural balance in how the marks cohere. A friend likened Chinese writing to landscape. Written like drawing, the meaning of the words gestures to the processes of the phenomenal world. I had been thinking about 巛, the radical for underground river networks, in which you can see three parallel streams flowing in the same rhythm. Like many other radicals, 巛doesn’t appear as a word in its own right but is a part of many other words; these words often seem to have no relation. In Chinese, radicals are often shared between words, which indicates connections, like the ‘three dots of water’ radical that is part of 流 flow, 湯 soup, 深 deep and 清 clear. The connection becomes less obvious when water radical appears in 況 situation, 決 decide, 活 live.

Tracing the connections is an etymological inquiry that is not necessarily directed towards an origin point, but to the web of how things have evolved in relation to each other. Words in Chinese are relational and usually come in pairs. Meanings are often indirect and emerge between the paired words like a magnetic field. To gather the family of 巛 river words, I was not aiming for an original or archetypal river, but to reflect on the myriad forms that its watery propensity can configure into. I invited friends and family — who have a range of experiences as Chinese and Korean diaspora — to practice writing certain words that share 巛 and send me a video recording. I sent each of them a list of words in no particular order and asked them to choose. The content of the writing was incidental to the process: it was a way to witness one another in writing, somehow closing a distance not simply by what we write but how we move.

Watching their videos made me long for the experience of sitting together and writing. It is a common, unremarkable thing to do: often at the kitchen table, pens and paper are at the ready and a discussion will involve the performing of writing — Yen Yuehping has described this casual, collective calligraphy as a quotidian expression of Chinese personhood (2005: 60). The workshop within the exhibition’s framework was informed by my desire to open up such a moment and space of casual calligraphy, a different mode of collective, embodied reading. Lesley reached out to the Hamilton Chinese School, and in collaboration with Toronto-based writer Fan Wu, we devised Writing in the Air, a workshop for teenage students, where we played with calligraphic brushwork, inventing and deconstructing components and movements. The prompts for this open-ended writing session included:

write the most balanced word you know

write the least balanced word you know

write a word that you invent
write with your non-dominant hand

write by cutting out

Inviting Fan Wu to co-facilitate the workshop was an easy decision: we had been playing with Chinese-English experimental translation extending from his poetry practice, when we studied together during Opposite Day (2021), an earlier project that I developed as a framework for what I call ‘embodied study’. In Toronto, there had been an afternoon of visiting my neighbour, artist Yam Lau, with Fan, which generated a particular energy that I wanted to revisit. Fan and I sat at Yam’s dining table; he had prepared a huge roll of paper and ink, and we assembled our brushes and dishes of ink and water. We started with writing our names, telling their stories and how we interpret them. It was a jockeying between Cantonese and Mandarin, simplified and traditional script, hints of our different generations and immigration histories emerging on the long page. Writing together, the conversation had room for silence; stories surfaced as we wrote.

Since Chinese is not a phonetic language, the words must be ingrained in the body as gesture — how you write matters. How you learn to write matters — the process of repeating the gestural order of strokes imprints the image and sound of the word into one’s embodied memory. This is a stark contrast to the English and French language education I received in the Ontario school system, which both reaffirmed colonial systems of knowledge production and prioritized individual expression, whereas the instruction of copying a word, some fifty times, was expected in our Chinese classes. This is not unlike the repetitive learning process of taijiquan, wherein the repeating is a processual way of knowing, such that the knowing settles into the body beyond a theoretical grasp, requiring the whole self — mind and body inseparably — to pay attention. I found resonance with how Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes repetition within Nishnaabeg land-based pedagogy:

When I asked my friends and family members about learning how to write in Chinese, for some it was a return, in the sense that they had learned the fundamentals as children. For others, it was their first language before alphabetic writing. For a few, it was virtually foreign, as their understanding of Chinese was predominantly oral and aural. For another, it was not Chinese at all, but Korean; this traces the historical imperial relations between China and Korea, evident in contemporary pedagogy and culture. Writing the ‘river words’ was thus an invitation to revisit our differences through language. As if reading across the sinkhole, over generational shifts, the practice of writing attuned us to the nuanced plurality of diaspora. When I was a child, I had ‘heritage classes’ with a Chinese teacher because my elementary school was situated in Toronto’s Chinatown. When I share these early memories of writing by repeating with Lesley and Fan, we map out the small differences in our processes of learning — from whom and how did we (or did we not) learn how to read and write in Chinese? Because there is no guarantee of literacy within the Chinese diaspora, other dynamics emerged, layers of knowing and not-knowing that co-exist within a processual sense of being. Writing together, we shared the page as it rolled out, not precious with what we wrote, as would be expected from a scholarly mode of calligraphy. Along the page, we mapped the gaps, blocks and flows of our incongruous literacies.

That afternoon, the sharing of writing opened a space where we could meet amidst the tensions and imbalances of our respective inclusions and exclusions from an ostensibly shared heritage. What else might emerge through such a shared practice of writing? The lingering questions and energetic tensions simmered until I could convene this workshop as part of Playing the Mountain, yet the afternoon at Yam’s could not be reenacted. We were met with a new set of unknown unknowns, in facing the group of teenage students whose dialects, accents, and diasporic roots were as different and tangled as our own. How could the space of writing together open up possibilities for reflection and play, to carve out a difference from how we normally practice writing? Or to witness how we each find balance ‘between balance and imbalance’?

At the gallery, while setting up the space with ink, water and brushes for the students, I asked Fan, ‘What do you want to learn?’ I had been devising prompts to correlate between balance as conceptual and compositional. I was moved by the openness of his response: Fan said he ‘just wanted to know how they experience things.’

As if from a sinkhole forest, my grandfather taught himself to play Chinese folk songs on various stringed instruments, after leaving Guangdong for Canada in his early 20s. Stretching from the kite string, I returned to the taut metal strings of his 揚琴 (Cantonese: yeung kam; Mandarin: yangqin) ‘Chinese dulcimer’, where the slightest vibration will cause the instrument to hum with resonance. I revisited video footage from the 2010s of my grandfather tuning his yeung kam in the kitchen; I had asked him to show me how he tunes it.

Re-watching, I was struck by his philosophy on playing music, which he shares while re-stringing the dulcimer. To teach me how to listen, my grandfather writes ‘music’ in Chinese. Here, the gestures that produce the words 音樂 (Cantonese: yum ngok; Mandarin: yinyue), ‘music,’ open up multiple meanings when spoken aloud. When spoken, Chinese words can sound like many things, and their meanings are highly dependent on the context. Floating between writing, speaking and context, one can produce fluid meanings and draw indirect connections. Here, my grandfather writes the word for ‘sound’ — 音 yum. We stay with the word, reading its parts. He points to the radical for ‘sun’ at the bottom of the word, and says music must be played ‘not too loud’, demonstrating this with a lamp. He is drawing the connection between shadow and sound — how music that is ‘too bright’ drowns out the subtleties. When I show this footage to Lesley, I don’t need to explain: she can hear ‘shadow’ 陰 in the word for ‘music’ 音 — they are both yum in Cantonese, yin in Mandarin.

Coalescing the materials in the space as a constellation, I wondered how to translate this way of listening for shadow in a spatial sense: how to find a blandness that allows the negative to fill without filling? In the gallery, the kites hang inert and videos are often viewed from a static position. I wondered how these things could be animated rather than perceived as art objects: to function as models, markers, documents, indexes of the processual?

Attending to how energy shapes a space, as a matter of non-presence; from everyday arrangements of 風水 fengshui principles, to the immersive site-specific artworks by Fujiko Nakaya who uses fog and mist as a medium, carving out possibilities in how audience members traverse the intangible (for example in her signature work at the 2nd Biennale of Sydney, Fog sculpture #94768: Earth talk, 1976). How could I invite the audience to move within the artwork, to shift perspective, to see the pieces less as finished products and more as processes in relation to one another?

I had been working with bamboo coils, long strands of thin reeds: pliable, delicate, and wound up with peng potential energy. In this material, I could trace an understanding of balance that is cultivated in the embodied practices of taijiquan and calligraphy. We write with bamboo, which is present in the word for ‘brush’ 筆. We write on bamboo — the earliest books were bound bamboo strips, upon which texts were inscribed vertically and stored by rolling into scrolls. Bamboo has taught us many things: how to bend without breaking, how to be versatile and scalable, how to grow with collective strength. Ironically, the disparaging term for Chinese diaspora born in a Western context is ‘bamboo’ — the outward Asian appearance, yet hollow inside. And yet it is this hollowness that allows bamboo to be flexible and resilient. It reminds me of how they use bamboo poles for scaffolding in Hong Kong, a practice some thousands of years old (Duhalde and others 2022). Bamboo poles are lightweight, flexible and both cheaper and stronger than manufactured alternatives. These days, they are held together with plastic zip-ties, a precise system of tying for scaffolding that typically exceeds twenty storeys. This practice of bamboo scaffolding is featured in Hong Kong’s pavilion for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennial, Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive, which describes not only a sustainable techne, but also a long-term relationship with a material that continues to teach us an ethics of soft resistance.

In Playing the Mountain, an array of these bamboo swirls is suspended by thread, like an intricate rollercoaster of loops. Filling the space with these bamboo swirls, I resisted objecthood; the curving line was rather like describing a movement that is neither presence nor absence. While I’ve spent hours methodically tying together the bamboo strips with threads, testing their pliability to see if they will snap under pressure by coiling them up, it’s a split second that the coils unravel into swirling forms, to which I can only acquiesce. The bamboo’s shapes emerge from their internal tension — the logic of compression and expansion that also informs taijiquan, wherein qi circulates from this very interplay of opposites.

With neither design nor intention, all I can do is let the forms emerge and then capture them with thread. It is an exercise in listening and responding to the materials, allowing the rhythm of coiling and uncoiling to shape the artwork. This acquiescence is not simply a passive acceptance, but, like taijiquan, a balance of initiating and yielding. Acting without acting is 無為 wuwei — the daoist principle of without intention. Another strategy learned from water, wuwei is often translated as ‘non-purposeful action’. Just as water acts without acting, wuwei untethers from the temporal horizon of focusing on a goal, and thus stays in the processual present — yielding and transforming yet nonetheless going on its way, without an aim. Like the movement of water, wuwei is understood as the way (dao) that cannot be exhausted. Mario Wenning, in theorizing daoism as a radical alternative to critical theory, writes that wuwei ‘emerged within a cultural context in which instrumental action has not been the only or even primary form of action (2011: 60) and as such ‘[r]ather than limiting non-instrumental action to the aesthetic realm as has been common in the European tradition (...) the domains in which actions can be practiced in a wu-wei-like manner is virtually unlimited’ (65). Reading across forms for wuwei, I found myself listening to the bamboo coils and the shapes that emerge from their material logic, just as taijiquan requires listening for the inner spiraling from which all movements emerge — balancing between attention and acquiescence, leading and following.

I draped the suspended bamboo swirls with paper cut-outs that curve and meander like stretched-out coastlines. The paper cut-outs are printed images of miniature mountain fountains that bring the flow of water — symbolic of wealth — to homes, offices, and retail sites. Irreverent and garish, the mountain fountains speak to both materialistic desire and the older, deeper prosperity that comes from flowing water as an animating vital force.

Following the contours of the mountain fountains, I had cut the A4 papers into spiraling lengths, as you might peel an apple, skin unbroken. Cutting, I lose sense of what is background and subject, what is part of the mountain and what is not. It echoes the writing exercises where we played with cutting out Chinese words and negotiated the process of distinguishing negative from positive. The mountain fountain becomes a continuous, if irregular, line that one cannot see as a whole, but can follow along with as it curves and spirals in and around the bamboo coils.

In shanshui hua, ‘mountain water painting,’ the image enacts the yinyang dynamic, inviting the eye to meander with and through the landscape by following the rhythm of opposites. This meandering movement eschews the fixed, singular perspective that dominates Western figurative representation; it can be understood as that which gives the image the quality of 活 huo, ‘liveness’. In other words, by inviting the gaze to move with it, the image lives. The word itself embeds movement: 活 huo has the three splash-like strokes on the left side that indicate ‘water’. In his theorizing of decolonial aesthesis, Rolando Vazquez writes of this single-point perspective:

The history of the modern gaze is, significantly, the history of technologies of representation: from the birth of perspective in the renaissance that achieved the geometrical abstraction of the real into representation, capturing the real on the two-dimensional surface of a screen, to the production of representation as reality, as the field of experience. The dominance of the gaze in western aesthetics has to do with a history of the possibility of abstracting reality into an object of representation, and in turn exercising the power of representation to produce a world as artifice. (2020: 25)

In the gallery, the bamboo curves and the paper cut-outs quietly interrupted the video projections. As I moved around with the video projector in my hands, experimenting with different angles, the shadows morphed and blurred. Rather than watching the video from a static point, between the illuminated images and the floating forms, the gaze shifted from foreground to background, flatness, roundness, shadow and light. The space became animated by this movement, this shifting. But when we fixed the projector to the wall, the shadows were gone.

We decided to take a break from installing and sat in the shade of trees, wrestling with how the installation was not quite there. How else might we understand ‘resolution’? If wuwei is a practice of relinquishing such directives, how might this materialize in the gallery space? When it comes to finishing an exhibition, we seek aesthetic resolution, but when reading art through taijiquan practice, there is no resolution. Rather, the body learns the feeling of ‘enough’: when breath fills to the limit, we know what is enough. In the space, negotiating with the fullness and emptiness of the bamboo and paper forms and their shadows, we wondered how to translate this enough-ness — how does something resolve? If the practice has no ‘point’, how does it conclude? Untethering resolution from illumination, Lesley says, ‘We need to bring back the shadows.’

Playing with meaning, she says it’s what my grandfather was talking about: shadow and sound. Lesley stretches the connection, drawing in another word: yum is yin in Mandarin, and yin sounds like the word for ‘cinema’ — ying — which can also mean ‘reflection’, ‘shadow’ or ‘trace’. I follow the constellation she’s drawing across our various shared languages. She speaks not in terms of definitions — what something is — but rather allusion: how something is like. We follow one another in making these connections, coalescing parallel experiences, fragments of inherited memories and gestures, the learned ability to listen in the gaps and between languages.

It is conversations like this one with Lesley that ground this artistic research, the roots of the visible constellation and the invisible processes. The artistic production itself is a framework wherein these relationalities can gather without the pressure to resolve as art objects, sometimes taking material form, and sometimes configuring as a shared gesture. This process opens the time it takes to notice change. In taijiquan practice, as one extreme transforms into its opposite — empty into full — waiting is crucial. Taking the time it takes to notice the change, only then can you shift. If balance is this process of orienting to change, it hinges on waiting, to feel the changes and then respond accordingly. These moments of waiting are not stagnant, but stillness, that is, the empty fullness of movement.

Sitting in the garden, this reading across yin /ying as ‘shadow, sound, cinema’ nudges us into movement. Lesley suggests we change the installation’s position, moving it away from the wall and into the centre of the space. It’s an involved process, to cut the threads and shift the whole thing. She knows that this will take time, and she knows I am hesitant to demand more effort of her and our technician. She knows to balance out my hesitance with insistence. We both know that this process is part of the inquiry.

Knowing that we are just here to try things out together in an ongoing inquiry that takes form as conversation, as movement, as tendencies and rhythms. ‘If it doesn’t work, we can move it back,’ she says, ‘Shifting, like shifting weight in taijiquan.’