No Way Out,  Performance, Chongqing, China, 2022. 

 

The exhibition hall has eight trees corresponding to seven groups of people. The trees vary in weight and height; each tree is assigned 1-3 performers. The performers must find a way to keep their trees from falling over. I set up a rule that the number of performers in each group is reduced by one on their basis, which means that they need to work harder and expend more effort to maintain the stability of the tree. Each group responds differently based on their characteristics, social group, work habits, life experience, and other factors.

 

This work reflects on the cruelty of neoliberalism and capitalism’s combined oppression in our current burnout society. Here, it refers to issues such as unrecognized labour, the invisible violence towards self-oppression and self-exploitation in the Byung-Chul Han sense, noting the pursuit of complete positivity and needs for accelerated progress in contemporary Chinese society, which evokes collective anxiety, pressure, fatigue, and helplessness.