Kaixiang Zhang
Wo weilest du?
Performance, London, UK
single-channel 2K video (colour, sound)
25 min
× 2
The performance takes place on an unnamed stretch of the Thames foreshore. At sunrise during low tide, amidst the grey silt and skeletal debris, I encountered waterlogged timber, coarse bricks, and fine sand. These objects did not belong here before a certain juncture in history; their positions shift incessantly with the tides, appearing and vanishing under the sun in a ceaseless cycle of waxing and waning. Reflecting upon the philosophical observation that "everything flows," I perceive these displaced materials as participants in a transient cycle. Upon this bank, I cast my body as a net thrown into time, fully aware that time itself can never be captured.
During the performance, I treated a plank salvaged from the water as a gnomon, using the riverbed as a dial. From sunrise, I gathered and stacked salvaged bricks scattered across the foreshore to mark the path of the morning shadows. I paced restlessly across the shore, using mounds of sand to trace where the final rays of sunset would eventually fall. This action was not intended to produce a static sculpture, but to allow the body and the river to weave together a connection between the present, the past, and the future. This construction remains active only until the tide returns to reclaim its order. The eventual dissolution of the work is central to its logic of becoming, its rhythm dictated entirely by the interplay of sunlight, water, and tide. While busy tidying a fragmented past and anxious to settle an uncertain future, I watched as the tide encroached upon the figure lingering in between, until this single fragment of the cycle of eternal becoming was utterly submerged.