Connecting people through art 

Experiences of the recent global pandemic are often corporeal: the soreness in the respiratory tract, the throbbing headache and raising temperature. The association between the body and health is so strong in the modern way of thinking that we sometimes forget, flesh remembers. Anger and anxiety, fear and paranoia, confusion and loneliness, lock-down and fangcang*--the past we are pushed to move on from can be documented and retold through muscles and bones, breaths and heartbeats.

In the three-channel video installation I Witness, Hao Jingban juxtaposes different bodies to delineate the corporeal dimension, the unutterability of mourning, memories, and their social reality: An old woman stuck perpetually inside a domestic space; four pairs of participants exchanging memories of loss; a line of people pacing back and forth in an open field. Sporadic sounds of whispering, heavy breathing, speaking, sobbing, coughing, and respirator wheezing interweave with the bodies that are trapped, that tremble, that move (on), accentuating a flesh-based strata of social landscape and the discomfort of a biopolitics embedded in the flesh.

Here, what is witnessed, testified, and empathised is not merely based on seeing – just like the old woman spends most of her time sleeping, the eight participants move with their eyes closed and recount their dreams. The way to dive into the social fabric, as the artist suggests, requires an embodied engagement with our expanding senses–to move when immobile, to write when there’s no word.

–Qu Chang