AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA-VII- Mixing identities, China, XIAO YANG, 2019

Photo Credit: XiangDong LYU, Sen LU

2019 performance on site (digital video archive) 14:58

The original performance AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA-VII- Mixing identities was taken place on a site in China (a space in the dimension of 198 x 198 square feet) in a non-stop repetitive action for 5hrs, with the participation of artist Grandmother, ZhiYing Yao.Birth implicates human beings in ethical relationships which subtend and precede both the identity of the individual and of society. The interwoven nature of these relations is evident in the ways we intuitively speak about them; the threads of fate and the social fabric. The thread of Yao’s life, her identity and relationship to Yang, is constituted in the sweater made by Yao’s own hand. This embodied artifact constitutes a nexus of identity, both personal and historic. Yang’s performance unravels this enveloping ancestral thread to reveal the outline of its very own trace — at once differing and deferring from its ineffable signification: identity. The psychological implications conferred by the objects present in the performance mirror the feelings arising from being a captive of fate, of a world constituted by one’s own subjectivity in experience and sensation, but in which one is nevertheless both at the mercy of and chained to — likewise to the ground of place and time.

The digital video archive was presented in London at THE LINE Contemporary Art Space in a group artists exhibition, from April 15 to May 14, 2021.

 Photo Taken by Ni Zhang

AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA I -Le Sinthome #1 , XIAO YANG, 2018

Autotraumapoeia I---“ Le Sinthome #1” is a video documentation from a live performance that copes with the Lacanian concept of symptom: the sinthome. Through the process of reclaiming one’s own traumatic experience in childhood, the notion of sinthome manifests itself in the form of self-recurrent traumatic events. The babbling form of vocalization of the certain chosen words with the needles in the mouth signifies the difficulty to speak up for the individual traumas in one’s childhood. When it comes to the spoken words, us, the speaking subjects whom were endowed with certain amount of rights to choose, whereas the unspeakable traumas pertains to the individual experiences, we were chosen. The words as the signifiers with the needles and threads serves as metaphors condenses together in the language of this work to refer a thing which is greater than redemption.  

*Sinthome: This archaic French word referred neither to the symptom that is a sign of disease nor to the symptom that results from the conflict between the subject’s unconscious desire and his ego-ideal. The “sinthome,” a word that includes the English noun “sin,” is s complex artifice that can help the artist (or any other creator) precisely to escape the mental disease that s/he incubates.

Photo Taken by Mark Snyder

Photo Taken by Mark Snyder

AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA II- The Scopic Reentry, XIAO YANG, 2018

The live performance was held in UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts at University at Buffalo in the presence of a group of viewers. The work was created to seek the possibility of extrapolating psychoanalytic concepts through the context of the individual traumatic experiences. Underpinning the practice of the work is the externalization of the uncertainty, tension, and endurance within. It mainly employs Freudian theories as the predominant instrument to manifest the unavoidable drive from death, as well as one of the partial drives of the scopic gaze. The work involves the use of a needle strung with a red thread and some clips.

The needle pierce the fingertips to form a cat’s cradle shape between the two hands with the medal clips on the skin at the back altogether forms a series of the self-reenacted traumatic events which based on the exploration of the mis-usage of the mundane objects.

Non-Exit #1, 2018, XIAO YANG collaboration: QI Wang

The live performance of Non-Exit #1 was taken place in Beijing at TsingHua University which was exhibited at University at Buffalo Art Gallery. The Antipodal show, Buffalo, NY. USA in September 2018. Performing the pre-preparation work involved covering the entire bodies in white medical bandage with the help of assistants and inviting the assistants wrote words selected by the artists that coped with the individual traumatic events that the performers experienced; self-harm, sexual abuse, cultural alienation. The performers’ ankles were wrapped with chains and their heads covered with fish bowls. Amidst the dense crowd of passersby, the performers walked backwards barefoot across the burning hot pavement.
    In addition the symbolic healing of wounds that the bandages posses, the wrapping of the performers also allowed them to appear as nearly identical doubles of one another. The healing bandages were marred with signified text, insinuating that the former traumatized experience is actually unable to be healed, whereas the external world moved away and the crowd never moved in the same direction as the performers. The two pieces of metal chain were used to suggest the heavy burden of the traumatized experiences that have been tangled up with every step in life. The fish bowl carried split significance with both the notion of a protective helmet and that of a self-isolating barrier that blocked the performers from the rest of the world.   

Photo Taken by Mark Snyder

AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA III- Your Eyes Hear My Voice, XIAO YANG, 2018

As part of the series of Autotraumapoeia this performative work is continuing the emphasis on the form of auto-reenactment of trauma; an action on a manifestation of the death drive, while more focusing on the exploration of the possibility to subvert the conduits between gaze and voice when we experience a certain conditioned instance. The work involves some same elements of a needle strung with red thread. The performance was held in one of the studio space at University at Buffalo.

The performative actions begin with my own physical body facing to the spectators with a piece of sheer fabric draping in between us. The thread with the needle on the end is swallowed into my stomach slowly from the other end of the thread until the end of the needle is hanging of my lip.  The bundle of thread is swallowed in will then be gradually pulling out of the stomach while sewing some words using that thread into the sheer fabric which drapes in front of my physical body serves as a barrier between me and spectators. The words are “your eyes hear my voice”. 

Photo Taken by Josh Elston

AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA IV—Killing Gazes, Killing In the Gaze, XIAO YANG, 2019

The live performance was held at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Buffalo, as part of solo exhibition of AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA. The work was created for the sake of striking up a conversation with the viewers, of which it was conveyed by the synchronized performative actions of a thousand of needles on the fabric driven by the force of the wind to constantly knock on the body, and the meanwhile both hands aiming to sew the two piece of mirrors on the thin layer of fabric on the eyes.

If the gaze and voice are on the list of partial objects which are so unspecularizable and so intangible then one may argue how do we know if it is real? Why does hit the Real matter in the journey of creation in such intense form of auto-reenacted traumatic events over and over again? Apparently, it does not seek for a satisfaction, but rather its own wish to continue to explore the correlated relationship between these two partial objects and the constant desiring subject in its further place: to make the invisible to be visible consciously whereas to change an unwanted circumstance into a preferred one emotionally. Therefore, to align the exploration as in the previous works’ continuation and furtherance: to condition a situation in which to hit the Real when it engenders in the conduit of gaze--- can we see ourselves seeing? Question of gaze per se, the moment of seeing, and the field of visible, are not initially decided, for a practicing creator, it is not simple to generate a work by the scientific studies from only psychological or technical perspective; the best way to describe a working knowhow actually derives from the gaze towards external world and the internal intentionality, which has to take into account many actual instances and prior experiences as the discovery of the blind spot in our audible field from the last work, which unravels the silent voice is the actual object voice, and it resides in the blind spot in our audible field. Hence, it continues the question if there is a blind spot in our visible field? In this case, it rewinds the question back to “can we see ourselves seeing?”

Photo Taken by Jessica Sun

AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA VI— Le Sinthome #2, XIAO YANG, 2019

The live performance was taken place at the Eleven Twenty Projects, buffalo as a closing reception for the solo exhibition, AUTOTRAUMAPOEIA. The work was driven under the sway of inviting this physical body as a symbol to relinquish the often hidden but long-term aftermath that the traumatized life’s been undertaken.

The people have been haunted by traumatic experience have been driven by a pressing urge to create that’s rooted in self-consciousness, wherein the works of art stand in equivalence to the function of the mouth as the primordial modus of speech. It became the last possible means of escape for us to resist the sense of discomfort that rises from the foundation of being alive. In the first primary action of the work, the scratch derives from the one’s actual symptom, which occurs very frequently in every instance of drowning in traumatic memories, which in turn triggers mental instability e.g. anxiety, uncertainty, and depression. The second primary action of wrapping symbolizes the desire of wanting to create a sense of self-recovery, yet which constitutes an actual self-restriction in the undertaking. The sharp finger nails substitute the presence of needles such as in the previous works, while sharing the same prick; sharp, but refined pain. Sinthome is represented in the compulsion to repeat embedded within the work, divertin from the original symptom to a symptomatic sublimation via the language of art.

Photo Taken by Noah Fence

NON-EXIT#2, XIAO YANG, 2018 Collaboration: Qi Wang

As second piece of Non-Exit which continues the exploration of compounding and rearranging the mundane objects for the sake of recurring the notion of the uncanny. The performance was taken place at Bird Island Pier, Buffalo, which also later was exhibited at University at Buffalo Art Gallery. The Antipodal show, Buffalo, NY. USA in September 2018.

The rubber band is often associated with its literal force of elasticity. The tension of a rubber band when we manipulate it in between our fingers resonates with the tension that coexists between both physical and mental dimensions when we experience traumatic events in our memory. Stretching the gap between either ends of a rubber band coincides with the mental stress that it is going to snap when overexerted. The breaking of the rubber bands signifies the inner struggle to reconcile the early traumatized experiences in one’s life. The tension of the rubber band also brings about the prediction of its eventual snapping, and it is this prediction that adds mental tension of the viewer in tandem with the physical tension of the rubber band itself.

Even a fragile thin piece of rubber band, which still carries a certain amount of strain on its own, can cause a kind of mental status of anticipation with great apprehension, the so-called “dread.” The expanding to the dimension of dread depends on the distance stretched by the rubber band. When the rubber band is increasingly stretched, likewise the saturation of dread increases. The accumulation of tension within dread pushes the duality of anticipation and fear, as the mental reward of predicting the snapping of the rubber band is met with the fear of it striking the one who stretched it too far. In this case, the exploration to the threshold of dread becomes an important motivation behind using the rubber bands within the performance. The stretched rubber band also serves as a metaphor counterpart to the traumatized individuals’ teetering nerves as they struggle to reconcile with the uncooperative debris of the traumatic experience in their memories. This dread from the rubber band runs parallel to the dread when struggling to walk away from trauma.