Floating Poetry, Meandering Mindscape, Berlin, Germany (2023)

Floating Poetry, Meandering Mindscape, the title of this performance event references a long history of literary artistic gatherings. The Orchid Pavillion Gathering of 42 literati, including—most notably Wang Xizhi (303-361)—took place during the Spring Purification Festival. The attendeesn engaged in a drinking contest known as “floating goblets” in which rice-wine cups were floated down a small winding creek along whose banks sat the waiting participants. Whenever a cup stopped, the person closest to the cup was required to empty it and write a poem. In the end, twenty-six participants composed thirty-seven poems.

Inspired by this historical, poetic event and longing for a utopian garden-like community, Yahon Chang’s performance delves into the moment of creating an indecomposable space where his act of painting brings us to a mystical union with the essence of being itself. His poetic imagination, with its fleeting lucidity, inhabits our elusive being. In collaboration with Isang Yun’s music, Chang’s performance allows us to experience for ourselves the constitutive phenomena of the Orchid Pavillion Garden in their indecomposable totality, in their indistinction, in their reciprocal penetration and in their movement and fluidity.
— Manu Park