Vortex, a Special Salon of the Cloister Project
Yao Qingmei: Godzilla Can’t Be Killed
2023.06.18 Sunday 19:00
Location
2F, The Cloister Apartments, 62 West Fuxing Road, Shanghai
Performer: Yao Qingmei
The performance of Godzilla Can't Be Killed will begin with the story of the Pyongyang Monster tying together several stylistic textual sections, which here contain Yao Qingmei's observations and fragmented feelings about the interior furnishings of the room during “a suspended period of time". "The two beds alone take up half of the entire space, and its size in this space is enough to justify the importance of the matter of sleeping. As long as the sleeping time is longer, the confinement time is shorter. "This is not only a retrospective of individual experiences, but also a mixture of Yao Qingmei's speculations on public and private spaces, dreams and reality. Yao Qingmei tries to create a text with varied forms of thickness. This will be a more open and relaxing experiment on reading.
About the Performer
Yao Qingmei (b.1982, Zhejiang) currently lives and works in Wenzhou and Paris. She achieved DNSEP with honors from Villa Arson, Nice, France in 2013, and was awarded the winner of Prix spécial du jury at the 59th Salon de Montrouge in 2014 in France, the Prize “Young Chinese Artist of the Year” in 2017 in China, the 68th Prix Jeune Création of Paris in 2018 and Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship in 2022.
Yao Qingmei’s practice traverses the boundary between performance and its site, frequently enacting intervention in public space to perturb the parameters of its reality and surroundings. Her art is deep-rooted in a critical reflection into the formulation of political and social questions, exploring how symbolic gestures gain or lose power through forms of appropriation and displacement. Here, humor plays an important role in her work, using the poetics of comedy to expose the absurdity of a particular issue. Offering different methods of resistance, her theatrical performances and interventions find their form in an area overlapping burlesque traditions of satire and parody, which combine with framing devices influenced by theatre sets and costume, pedagogical lectures, the dialectic between image and text, choreography inspired by modern dance.
Major solo exhibitions include: The burrow, Magician Space, Beijing, CN; The Tetrachromatic Dream of the Dichromats, Galerie Liusa Wang, Paris, FR (2018); La commerce du parole, Atelier Blanc, Villefranchede Ruge, FR (2018); The Ecdysiast, Magician Space, Beijing, CN (2017); Professor Yao, OCAT Xi’an, Xi’an, CN (2016); Recrute Mendicant/ SDF pour une foired’art contemporain, Marseilles, FR (2015); One Hour Occupy Parking Lot, Paradise, Nante, FR (2015); Professor Yao, Magician Space, Beijing, CN(2015); Vernissage Nouvelles Expos, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2014).
About the Vortex
Vortex is a long-term project. We will update the content of performance lectures by artists and talks by experts both on- and offline. Following the fundamental approach of connecting local practice, theories, and context, we hope that this nonstandard art venue will become a place of torrents, flux, and confluence.
