Let’s start this conversation by thinking about conversations. The conversational form is your method of study, your method of collaborating with people. What is it about the dialogic form that is important or fruitful for you? For me, part of the appeal is play and responsiveness to unexpected thoughts, words, or associations. Another part is building through conversation. When we talk regularly, we refer to things we said earlier, to things we’re reading or people we’re thinking of. But it’s hard to grasp or define the learning aspects of conversations. There’s the engagement during the conversation, and then there’s something that usually shows up at different moments after the conversation, right?

I come back to the question: what does talking do in terms of learning? What is the relationship between what we know and what we can articulate? As Audre Lorde says: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[1] To re-examine these tools – in particular, our words – is a fundamental discomfort that we need to experience. Since I’ve been reading across dao related writings translated from classical Chinese, I am in an unfamiliar place, and from here, questioning the particularity of how western thought uses words.

Unlearning Western epistemologies, or unlearning Western modes of thought…I don’t know if that’s possible without breaking down your use of language and specifically the use of the English language. I am taking a class with Dolleen Manning (Anishinaabe) right now and she talks about trying to articulate the mnidoo[2] – “spirit/mystery, potency, potential – in conversation with Western philosophers. For her, it’s a strategy to subvert the dominance of Western theories, to put Anishnaabe philosophy on the same level, despite the difficulty of articulating those concepts of mnidoo in the English language. She once mentioned that English also became the dominant language because it’s a dominating language.

Western thought and Western culture privilege articulating with clarity and precision. In writing about the 易經 Yi Jing, François Jullien asks, does thinking necessitate questions?[3] Jullien writes that, with the Yi Jing, there’s no meaning to read into. It’s just a description of how things operate.
I’m intrigued by his argument that the drama of decoding and unwrapping meaning – this messianic relationship to meaning-making –  is built into how we define truth by making arguments through words, in English and the languages of modernity/coloniality: they are grammatically equipped to dominate.

Back to your question of “what is talking doing in terms of learning,” what about things that can’t be clearly articulated?

I think I’m becoming very comfortable with just following my gut, and not articulating when I don’t think it needs to be articulated.

I know you’re reluctant to call things “exhibitions”; it’s interesting what happens if you call something a “project” rather than an “exhibition.” “Project” has other kinds of connotations about beginnings and endings, processes, phases, and results, right? So if we’re saying this is not an exhibition, but this is something else, what would that do to the process of noticing, or of seeing the work and being with the work? Again, we’re circling back to the relationship of language to perception and experience.

I think there’s this edge of things being vague and as precise as they need to be, but not fixed. How do we get to those relationships of being with words where you’re not rushed into meaning-making?

Because within Opposite Day, you and your study partners were working at different paces, but where you were consistently and constantly in conversation. You were working towards something, but not in this way that’s fixed as a goal within the conversation itself. And that makes me think, what happens to all these conversations after they’re “done”?

What is ongoing study, right? These conversations were overlapping with wave hands, like clouds, not eyes [4] and those were always very much going to be ‘materialised’. Like the conversations with Vancouver-based collaborators Megan Hepburn and Gina Badger about creating scent gestures to be experienced in the space, and with Lee Su-Feh about taijiquan practice and diasporic experience, and all this other stuff. Yeah, there’s just no rush for it to be a thing.

Maybe what’s happened as well is that I’ve felt myself change my pace and reflect on my tone with some people more than others, which is neither here nor there. But with some people, like with Alix, when we were walking, it was a feeling of very deliberately slowing down. And not packing in words. Really just letting go of the need to talk, actually. That transfers over to being in conversation with the things around me, like the things that I’ve had for years, the things that I’ve just come across in the last paragraph, connecting with the things that I’ve been carrying with me for like the last ten years, you know? Carrying with me in dreams. Something that I keep going back to is my 公公’s (grandfather’s) house; I just had another dream about the house the other day.

 Many of your projects are based on collaborations.. In my work, which is almost always collaborative as well, I often think of the intricate details of collaborating with others that are not only about the nature of the project, but the nature of our relationship – how conversation builds, how ideas develop, how personalities click, or not, how understanding flows, etc., and how that feeds into the nature of the work. I guess one thing to think about is: what’s visible from the nature of the collaboration in the project/exhibition/documentation?

Working with others is double-layered: paying attention to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. When you start to work together, you might ask, “How do you like to work? What’s your mode of collaboration?” To even ask the question directly like that, super pragmatically in my North American English, what does that presuppose – that we can articulate the how of working, when it’s like…we kind of know how we work. So talking about “how to work”  – what can that do, beyond just figuring it out by working together?

Things happen, right? Things develop organically. But then if there’s a problem, or if there’s a conflict, it’s hard to deal with because you’ve never talked about it. Things are kind of “out there.”

The how is to just build up a relationship: giving something time and space means that you pick up on those things. You don’t actually need to articulate it. But what it requires is a reciprocity of reading: Like, are you reading what the other person’s giving you? And are you expecting them to read into what you are giving them, that you might not even be aware of? For me, this always comes back to the choreography of restaurant or manual labour jobs – the energy or flow that comes from anticipating each other’s needs within a certain space and time. 

Doing versus articulating or feeling things versus articulating them. I’ve often felt that the work that I do in Jordan, like Spring Sessions for example, is much about doing, doing, doing.[7] Whereas here (in Toronto) I feel like there’s a lot of attention paid to articulation, there is a lot of thinking around language, but it doesn’t necessarily correspond to doing. There’s a lot of language and documenting and positioning things, like it could survive just in the realm of language without necessarily enacting or embodying things.

Exactly. And I mean, that’s the crux of what I was trying to have inform the methodology of Opposite Day, without it actually overtly informing it. Because the way I related to everyone individually was in response to who we are as individuals, and like, what kind of relationship we have. So there wasn’t an overarching “This is the ‘cookie cutter’ for all of our relating.”

What’s been happening with your study partners since the project started? Have relationships evolved, changed or died down?

The relationships are ongoing but now there just isn’t such an urgency or regularity of structure in meeting with them. That moment, bracketed as a ‘project’, was about building up new modes of sensitivity and attunement, learning new ways of noticing.

It’s nice to let these things rest for a bit, right? Then they’ll come back somehow, in their own way.

Yeah. This attenuation to just being receptive to certain things, or being able to put certain things together…to put things side by side, but not try to force a meaning out of it. Because I feel like, in this range of conversations and the range of comfort or discomfort that people have with things having a point or not having a point. Or there being the centrepiece to the meal, the roast goose in the center of the table, and everything else is a side dish, you know, how people want it like that, or whether or not people want to eat, like, dim sum style, right? Like, “Oh, what’s here? Oh, that looks fine. Yeah, let’s have a bit of that! Oh, we need some more tea to balance this out,” you know? There’s no centrepiece, it’s just whatever comes along and goes well together, you know?

Yeah, it’s also noticing in what parts of our lives do we expect there to be more direction? Expect there to be more articulation of a goal, or like, something to “get” from this? But also, conversely, sometimes you get so excited about an idea, or excited about a connection, and you just rush into it. And I find myself doing that a lot. I suppose it’s a very cerebral way of producing.

Yeah, this rush is exciting though; when you make this connection or feel a surge of energy and you rush into it. And then afterwards I guess you can take a step back from it and see it from a wider perspective and be like, Oh yeah, okay, chill. There’s this, but there’s also that. But there’s also that other thing! Like dim sum, right? There are many different varieties, and you can’t just have one kind. In the end, your circle back to the ones you liked the most.

I don’t want to call anything an ‘exhibition’.

[rolling cigarette] Yeah, I’m curious: what is it about the term ‘exhibition’ that doesn’t satisfy you? I think for wave hands, like clouds, not eyes at Or Gallery in Vancouver you called the work a series of encounters, which was also curiously developing at the same time as Opposite Day.

‘Exhibition’ is very cold, detached, it’s sort of pre-determined as an art framing, and I want to be inside this thing. I mean, it’s about internal processes. Yeah, I don’t know, a sort of turning inside out or something to be inside of, like an experience. So I keep saying ‘space’ instead of ‘exhibition.’

Exhibition seems to me to imply you putting objects on display, whereas space is more about the feeling you are trying to elicit in an environment. I also feel like it’s not just about it being this kind of internal space for the viewer though, it’s also part of your process of making the work.

Yes…and I’m not so interested in interactions with art-as-exhibition, as representations. I think this is also a very fundamental thing in studying with an understanding of how these philosophies are not written about but are rather practised. The writings are indications of what is happening when you’re practising through embodied forms, so all of these forms of embodied study, they’re links to this thing, but you’re not going to pinpoint it to a concept. It’s not a dead butterfly pinned in a box way of “knowing” something: you’re always practising in order to try and grasp it by feeling it, and this is what aesthetics does. Like how Rolando Vazquez calls for decolonizing aesthetics as the means of reorganizing the senses: ethics in relation to how you order your senses – how you sense, how you know, how you relate.[8]

I remembered you as I was reading Imagining Water in the Anthropocene (Astrida Neimanis)[9] and particularly thought of water in your installations. She tries to theorize this concept of “bodies of water” as a way for us to relate to water; and as a way of thinking about environmental justice and ways to remedy our abuse of water. But also, “bodies of water” as in: we are made of water, everything is made of water. It’s interesting to think about that in terms of embodied practice and all of the things we were talking about with Opposite Day and your installation in Vancouver. So, what the Anthropocene does is that it selects certain qualities of water, and they become what water is. Water as an infinite resource, for example or “clean water.” Whereas she’s saying if we want to think of it as “bodies of water,” we need to select different qualities of water: like malleability, like the fact that it’s in so much of our bodies, its fluidity, gestational capacity, interconnectedness, and its flexibility, its ability to respond to what and how we make of it. Selecting these other qualities of water and amplifying those in order for us to then be better with water.

I think that, in what Neimanis writes about in terms of this ontologic of water, of amniotics, like for all those watery qualities, she’s articulating what is understood in 陰陽 yin yang cosmology – I think she calls it an “open-closed loop” – this interplay between yin yang; fundamentally, there is nothing outside of it. It is a closed-open loop. It’s not that it is everything as a fixed totality, but that it’s constantly changing. So everything is always just a manifestation, however long that takes. Some are quick, some take ages – but like whatever, because what is time – but they’re all just manifestations of something congealing and something diffusing, right? It’s just those opposites, that are paradoxically the same thing. 

So with Opposite Day, I was trying to trace how we make and perceive distinctions, recognizing that they are also not distinct. They are ‘made distinct’ through words, but this is only a certain kind of ‘sense.’ So what do you do? How do you treat each other – how do we treat things – with this in mind?

What do we do with this in practice? Like, not in theory.

Yeah, I think that through these conversations, and why I don’t want to call things ‘exhibitions’, I’m finding that it’s about the operation of noticing: we do all of these things in order to notice; a question of how to notice.

I think you once said, “all reading is extractive.”

[laughs] I probably did… these days, as I’m trying to get close to Chinese writing, I just repeat and repeat to memorize the shapes and sounds; copy it out… It’s just sitting with the texts, and writing, and reading, and digesting; to consider reading as eating.

This project of legibility … maybe it’s also about sitting with things, and not necessarily understanding everything. Thinking about doing versus articulating, or reading theory about something that is so unexplainable. I think it’s similar to our relationship with dreams, for example – do you do any readings or analysis, or do you just dream?

Since I was in sixth grade, I’ve written down my dreams as much as possible. But no, I’ve never looked them up. I’ve never had any desire to, I don’t need them to mean anything. I just write them down so I can go back to that feeling of being there. Very often I draw architectural elements and describe spatial elements, trying to describe it so that I can revisit it.

Only in the pandemic did I start a dream journal. I wrote down my dreams randomly here and there throughout, but now I have one really long document that lists so many dreams. And it’s interesting, so many of my recollections are trying to describe the space. When I go back and read the dream journal, I’m always surprised to see patterns and repetition in spatial elements, as well as movement and feeling and characters. But also, in this quest of articulating things that are hard to grasp, I think for me, it’s not about making meaning out of them, but I think there’s something worthwhile in trying to describe things, like dreaming, in detail.
At the moment of writing, the dream is not material anymore, although it’s still with you and it was material when you were in it.

Yeah, it’s interesting to think about this as a body of writing that has no desire to make meaning of things and exists as description: it creates different readers. For me, it’s to go back to a feeling of being sure of a logic of something. There’s the Chinese word 理 li for ‘order’, in the sense of following the grain in wood, or vein in stone; an internal logic. When you’re experiencing the dream and something ridiculous happens, or someone says something, it’s like, this makes so much sense! I don’t even know what it means, but I love this feeling of conviction, being dropped back into that logic.

That’s so true. Waking up with this feeling of conviction is so real. But not being able to do anything with it, really, but can you carry it with you, so there’s actually much to do with it, as a sensibility.

I was thinking about this in terms of the piano, there’s this internal logic of playing a song: its tonal structure, harmonic narrative, and this sense of resolution that are part of the canon of European/western cultural imperialism. But playing allows me to loosen up what my mind is doing, that double-bind, because my mind, my eyes, my ears, my hands are occupied. So then all these other critical thoughts go off in a different direction and you don’t make those distinctions, and there’s just the logic of the song. In a way, it’s like the logic of a dream, where you don’t get stuck in contradictions. It’s not that they don’t exist and you don’t fully let go, but it’s a way of letting go while being aware of the contradictions.

Yeah, it’s, again, just being with the thing and sitting with the thing, and not having to make meaning out of it.

It’s funny because you just can’t talk about music. You can, of course, but there’s also no point in talking about it, which is wonderful. I feel like visual art has unfortunately gotten away from that. It always seems like you can talk about it.

Do you miss the idea that there’s no point in talking about art, or not having to talk about it?

I don’t even know if it’s a matter of missing it, because I don’t know if I’ve ever actually experienced that. Words are such a prerequisite with visual art, as a ‘discipline,’ which is why I think performing has always been interesting to me.

Because you’re just doing it.

Yeah, and this came up in another conversation yesterday: even if you don’t share the same embodied vocabulary – like if you’re watching someone carve something – you could be thinking of it in terms of martial arts; or you’re watching someone sew something: it activates a certain material embodied understanding of that thing. And you might not share all the skills and training of that person, but you can get into it. And I think that that sort of prehension – of any sort – is what lets you enter another’s experience; the performing allows you to notice. It’s not about empathizing with their subjectivity… And by ‘perform’ I just mean, like, do a thing.

After our conversation, I’m gonna have an exercise session with my dad.

And what happens when you’re practising with your father?

Oh, it’s a model for me. I’m learning. I’m learning from watching him. Watching my dad and seeing how he watches how things are done… it was always him doing karate, and watching skaters and swimmers during the Olympics, and now it’s also how he watches rhumba, waltz. He watches movement; he watches by moving. He finds the grain of things, in different things. It’s that same kind of jumping into an internal logic that just feels right somehow. And that, I don’t think you need to talk about. Hmm. To see someone else really sinking into it. I just learn so much from others modelling things, just by getting a glimpse of how they sense the world.