Baptism, is a ritualistic performance project I have always wanted to do. Yes, I prefer to describe the project as a performance live perfo- rmance than an action. baptism/washing, as one of the important acts in the Western religious context, is intended to provide a transition-trancscendence. Water, as a heavenly object essential to the ritual, is the medium of direct contact with the body, and the act of cleansing not only removes evil, but also represents a new direction for the future destiny of the baptized person, i.e., the return of the body to the divine realm. If I want to strip the purpose of “baptism” of its religious process, I have to mention the “body” as the main recipient of baptism. Where does it go from and where does it want to go?
As Judith describes it: although the body is “one’s own,” the body as body is always transferred to others. This is categorized by the body’s biological sexism as well as its socio-cultural and geographical conditions. As a cool queer born and raised in an East Asian cultural context and influenced by Western youth culture and contemporary art education, I have serious genderperformance anxiety.
How do I present my self and the body I desire to own to society, friends and family when I take off my Lacanian mask? I’m afraid of the phallus and the uterus, and I’m afraid of all the “binary” shortcuts that are forced upon me before they can be defined. What a man should do and what a woman should do seems to have been determined by social universality before the birth of my consciousness and my body, which was born “safe” against my conscious mind at the moment I had no control over it. In the eyes of others, my body, behavior, patterns, and destiny are labeled as unfamiliar to me. Is the world shaping me into a false me or a true me, and where are the boundaries of my body when all I can see is fog? Doubtful as I am, I also seem to accept that such doubt will always remain stable. Sex is fluid and the body can become detached from norms through medical re-engineering. Although the environment is not currently adapted to Queer’s guidelines for regulation, it is at least possible to gain a brief release and confession of the unspeakable on a personal, spiritual level. With this in mind, I would like to perform a “baptism” for the gender and the ego, using water that will no longer be holy water, but amniotic fluid, which symbolizes the interior of the mother’s body. I need to choose an acceptable direction when returning to the chaos of life.
—— Ai pingxu
About artists
Ai pingxu
A graduate of Goldsmiths College, University of London, Xu Nuanping has been active in some of Shanghai and London’s darker venues as a physical transgressive practitioner, subculture and cult of cool.
Favoring extreme visual and physical experiences, her artistic practice encompasses all aspects of the body/flesh in both theatrical and online mediums. The politics of the body and its abstract landscapes are a constant concern in Nuanping’s work, and she is passionate about putting the characteristics of the body into various physical and non-physical environments and materials, performing movements with specific purposes and principles inherent in the white body, and creating a field of sensory responses. She is a fan of the human body’s characteristics between critique and emancipation in different cultural contexts, and specializes in exploring its fragile yet highly resilient side.
