Witness the creation of WeiZen Ho’s artwork Purge II in the Unbroken Gestures exhibition.
By bringing together food materials, mastication, bodily movement and respiratory force, WeiZen enacts the yearning and deep hunger associated with living outside one’s own culture.
Purge II will occupy an open process over three hours, at Art Space on The Concourse in Chatswood. This act of masticating a higher-than-normal quantity of food ingredients used in recipes from her home environment is akin to excavating her cultural memory body.
About the artist
WeiZen has been devising and presenting open-disciplinary performances since 1999. Her practice has expanded through music-visual concerts, into solo and participatory works which intersect performance art, ritual and installation. These works employ significant accoutrements and deep imagery to coalesce relationships between body, voice, sound and site.
Recently returned from a Rotterdam research, WeiZen explored the framework of Being and Place with local residents through Walk with me, Rotterdam, for Performance Art Event (PAE). She adapted Stories from the Body (SFTB) #1 into a participatory work, utilising the public space surrounding the sculpture ‘Maman’, and the North Wing site, for the opening and closing programme for the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at AGNSW. WeiZen and Ryuichi Fujimura also devised a 3-hour performance titled Pink Regenesis of the Curse, for the lower grounds of White Bay Power Station at the EDGE Inner West, 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024).
Thank you to Mandy Burgess and Dinah Beeston from Primrose Paper Arts for their support and guidance in the paper-making process.
Image: WeiZen Ho, Purge, 2023, photograph of public performance at Grace Exhibition Space, Manhattan, as part of New York Live Art Tour 8, Immersive. Photo by Beate Linne.