Yi-Hong Wang (Hong) ~ (This Page Intentionally Left Blank)

Yi-Hong Wang's "(This Page Intentionally Left Blank)" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 2, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.

Here you will find the documentation of Yi-Hong Wang's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.

(This Page Intentionally Left Blank)

Yi-Hong Wang's question: Would you stay at this page again?

Yi-Hong's introduction: In my practice, I explore cinematic temporality with projectors. I am interested in the experience of perceiving, forgetting and arriving in an image. I am interested in the image as a space to forget, and the disjunction between forgetting and remembering. Tetralogy of Absence (2022-ongoing) is a live performance series with empty slides and fragmental narrative as a ground for relating. The performance explores image emptiness as a solace space, and the tension between image and documentation. Along with the projected empty image, the narrative refuses “reliable” history, memory, timelines or geographical locations. Still, the taste of joy, unease, peace, pain, passion, conflict, and helplessness are never fictional but always incised. On embodying what one knows is already known and one can only recognise it.

Bethany's report: The performance begins in stillness. The auditorium is shrouded in darkness, heightening the audience's awareness of the ambient sounds of the space—restlessness, murmurs, shifting seats. What sounds like a bell rings gently, breaking the silence, its sound suggestive of movement. It feels as if someone is approaching, their presence marked by the faint sound of this bell. The pace is deliberate, evoking a sense of anticipation and guiding attention to the subtleties of sound, an intentional slowness.

The projector screen at the back of the stage activates, displaying what first appear to be grids or aerial views of pastures. Upon closer observation, the images reveal themselves as layered brushstrokes of paint on white, sometimes shown upside down or blurred into motion. The brushstrokes, seen up close, reveal textures, scratches, and transfers on transparent paper, projected like old-fashioned photo slides. The meditative pacing creates space for abstraction, inviting the audience to project meaning onto what they see and hear. Intermittently, the slides are blank, leaving extended pauses of nothingness. This absence invites reflection, the stillness emphasizing the interactions of pressure, scratches, and dirt transfers in the slides when they return. The slides and the sound of the performer moving across the stage, create cycles of repetition and difference.

As the images continue, the performer becomes apparent on the stage (to my viewing position), moving deliberately and slowly across the space with prolonged strides. He holds several glasses in either hand, their clinking sounds tracing his movements, marking the light moments of trembling or imbalance. His slow, methodical steps almost seem to indicate the impossibility of stillness, as if he is struggling to maintain an equilibrium in the motion forward. He repeats the phrase "no pain" which reverberates through the auditorium. The trembling, the intimacy of the movement, and the fragility of the sound suggest discomfort, vulnerability, and an aching persistence.

The image track shifts onto a small screen beside the stage, towards which the performer is moving. The images devolve into pure visual noise—static lines and scratches—erasing coherent visual information. The performer is illuminated only by the light of the projector as he crouches, the glasses slipping from his hands and shattering loudly on the ground. The mantra continues, no pain, even as the shards of sound and image break the tenuous equilibrium of the space.

Ramon Amaro: Ramon reflected on the performance, describing it as a moment where words felt insufficient—a space where language struggles to capture what was shared and experienced. He noted how the performance seemed to intellectualize the very concept of a moment that defies intellectualization, requiring the same depth of thought that the piece itself demanded. The first response that came to his mind was simply, "Damn."

He shared how the performance brought him to a place where he could only talk around the image, rather than about it directly. For Ramon, the image was central to the exploration of self—how we perceive our environment, aesthetics, and the psychosocial forces that organize our being. He suggested that these affectual forces always culminate in an image, whether that image is conceptual or perceptual, and that this process shapes coherence in our perception.

Ramon considered how the abstraction in the performance—and his inability to find language for it—opened a new perceptual space, a departure point for the body to act and for the mind to process. This, for him, was the "right kind of loss for words," where abstraction forces us to reimagine our ways of being. He mused that this silence, this grappling with absence, creates an urgency around the image, as it unfolds in sociopolitical and psychological capacities. He referenced Judith Butler's Frames of War, reflecting on how framing an image can carry the weight of an accusation or a claim, while also questioning the ownership and meaning of the image itself—a nod to Susan Sontag’s assertion that all images are inherently charged.

Ramon suggested that the performance explored this tension between image construction, abstraction, and the body. It created a sensory relationship where the body became a vessel, and the performer's utterances and movements formed a kind of corporeal abstraction. These elements, he noted, allowed the performer to transmute into something new, a process that felt unforced and dynamic rather than choreographed. For Ramon, this transformation—and the blankness, the spaces of nothingness—was one of the most powerful aspects of the piece. It rearticulated how perception engages with the white wall, the projection, and the image itself.

He compared the performance to the work of an artist who particapted in the residency program at Het Nieuwe Instituut, who deconstructs LED screens down to their crystal levels. During her residency, what began as a project about environmental concerns and e-waste evolved into an investigation of the image itself. For Ramon, this echoed the performance's urgency: a return to the image as a subject of inquiry, not to determine what the image might mean, but to honor its absence, its presence, and its totality.

Ramon concluded by praising the performance as a fantastic move—a complex choreography that extracted ego and allowed perception to flow freely. He saw it as entering a quantum space of perception, where the image, abstraction, and the body converged to create something deeply consequential and profoundly urgent.

Antonia Majaca: Antonia reflected on how deeply the performance resonated with her, expressing that she hadn’t realized how much she needed this peace at that moment. It brought to mind times of exhaustion, when one craves a space of desensory relief—a void to inhabit for even just twenty minutes, to sit with the thoughts in one’s head. She felt the performance powerfully provided that space, allowing her to simply be in the moment with full presence.

She admired the way the performance used its tools to enable the void and nothingness to be experienced and made visible. This, she noted, is a rare and rich vehicle for the imagination, a space that can be difficult to access in everyday life. For Antonia, the performance created an opportunity to dwell deeply in the experience, to find a path into that meditative space.

She reflected on the concept of emptiness, acknowledging that empty spaces are never truly empty—they are always filled with the potential for everything waiting to manifest. The void, she suggested, is always entered with so much already present within us. For her, the performance was a strong meditation, a profound pause, and an incredibly beautiful piece of poetry.

Part of her wanted to connect the performance to the Western tradition of the iconoclastic image: the image of war or the unrepresentable, and the historical limits of visual representation, particularly in relation to trauma. However, in this instance, she chose to let herself simply experience the performance as it was, without intellectualizing it further. It was a moment of stillness and imagination that she deeply appreciated.

Inti Guerrero: Inti reflected on the performance by considering the concept of the "unwatchable" in relation to images. While he acknowledged that the performance was not explicitly about this theme, it seemed to follow a thread that there is no such thing as an empty image. Every image carries weight, context, and meaning, even in its apparent absence.

He connected the performance to a work of art from 2002 titled The Lament, an immersive piece experienced in a highly physiological way. Inti described it as a corridor where viewers walk toward a glare of light and text, their eyes adjusting as their pupils dilate to adapt to the surrounding darkness. The first text in the piece referenced Nelson Mandela’s time in prison and the labor he was forced to do in the limescale mines. Without sunglasses to protect their eyes from the glare, prisoners' vision was permanently damaged. The second text in the installation spoke about Bill Gates’ 2001 acquisition of a massive photographic collection, donated to a national archive for digitization. This process, with its immense scale and speed, included an image of Mandela at the moment he left prison—a powerful and iconic photograph.

AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 ~ Chameleon Orbit

About: Yi-Hong Wang (Hong)