Kunqu Opera Ravishing Disunities by Lucy Liu

Details

Description

In a video of me performing a graceful piece of Kunqu Opera, I weaved in a second, more painful and questioning narrative of me doing abstract body performance in black clothing. The two channels switch back and forth, coming together through lining up similar gestures. The Kunqu Opera piece is about a young woman's dream of meeting her beloved. As my teeming mind takes Kunqu performance as an entry point to a dream of immense Chinese legacies, the abstract performance conveys the message of me trying to find awakening from this dream, thus the video juxtaposes these different worlds. It recognizes the disunities between the young graceful woman I am supposed to act in Kunqu Opera and my modern self, and how I am not able to escape certain historical legacies, at once ravishing and suffocating, that have been imposed upon my life.