Concept and Process - Transcultural Collaboration

KOWLOON PARK – YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

九龙公园 – 人如其食

Title of our work and themes

Our work originates from our experience of the Kowloon Park, Hong Kong, and it is broken down into two stages.

The first stage explores the theme of the struggles from within, between humans and with nature, through our experimental work “Mirror of Nothingness”.

The second stage concludes with our final work “Kowloon Park: You are What You Eat”, which observes the park as a micro-world of our shared co-existence in the ecological and socio-cultural environment and presents the interaction between human and food as a lens through which we explores wider themes of sociality, the dialectics of freedom and control, birth and decay.

The Map of Kowloon Park

The Entrance of Kowloon Park

Process

At the initial stage, we agreed on the theme of struggle and on the use of video as the primary medium. We experimented on movement and dance for the video and the live performance. Our performance work is unified by the temporal rhythm of the video.

At the final stage, we agreed to use the Kowloon Park as a point of departure and as a microcosm to explore the theme of “You are what you eat”. The theme of food turns out to be more abstract than concrete as our interpretation and individual directions become divided as the work develops. We have each chosen a different media in the combined presentation.

Mirror of Nothingness – Video, performance and installation at XXX Gallery

The video composes movements based on a poetic and spiritual narrative on the banyan trees, the flamingos and the water fountain in the park and the realisation of imminent destruction.

The live performance mirrors the dance movements within the video and develops the narrative beyond the video to explore the theme of struggles more generally.

We set up a mirror installation for the performance and trial the audience use of experimental pink flashlights as a special effect at the performance venue.

The style is surrealist and follows the aesthetics of the theatre of the absurd. The conflict is present between the serious and the ridiculous/ funny, sadness and happiness.