Comment about “26 days in OKS”
At the window a white drapery, that lets the room appear in soft light. In the middle the artist stands in a flowered white sundress. There are paper boats floating around her in the air. She closes her eys and is swaying her body in steady pulse from right to left and back, like in trance. In her 26 performances Yingmei Duan staged surreal dream pictures, which grab fragments of memory and put on atmospheric. These are things out of her life: anguishes, aspirations, experiences. Often she is shown sleeping. Elemnts around her are giving hints about the matters of the dreams. The spectator can break into the dreamworlds and at the same time, he is konfronted with his own desires and fears.
In performance-art authenticity and immidiacy are important facts, with however can only adhere for the moment of presentation. The spectator can get aktive personally while he is behaving in interaction to the artist. Sometimes reactions and a direct contact to the artist are part of the performance. Therefore the dokumentary of performances is a difficulty and so a video or fotography can only have the meening of a relict of an event in the past. It doesn`t replace the moment of presentation with its execution. Thus works of performance artists are on display mostly on the occasion of various artistic events and festivals. The performances get presented there as dynamic, lively happening. As interplay of artistic action and reaction of the audience performance lives from alteration and moving. The processing character which underlies all form of art is here getting viewable for the public. For the artist Yingmei Duan this characteristic is initial point and philosophy of her producing. She looks at her work as unstable conglomeration of ideas, which can be varied all time, which can be overworked afresh, and afford new resolutions time and again.
The concern to make this viewable for the audience leads to the idea for a conceptual exhibition. The artist got asked to make a one month display of her work at the OKS Galery in Braunschweig. She took this as occasion not only to show live performances, but to reveal her artistic work as constant hassle with ideas and permanent production of concepts.
Daily Yingmei Duan showed a one hour performance. Beforehand she outlined the concepts for those 26 performances on a 60meter role of paper. The drawings and notices covered all walls and formed a surrounding ribbon. Every day she looked at the papers and adapted her concepts, crossed some thing or added comments. On this way the audience got not only an impression of the “ready” opus, but also a direct view in the procedure of the artist. Additionally the spectrum got enlarged by video documentary. In the exhibition room there was a camera that took pictures of the performance. While entering the gallery, the audience first saw the monitor with this recording. When the people got in the exhibition room thereupon they were able to witness the live performance and to see for themselves the virtue.
The performances were shown every day at the same time so that it result a special regularity respective to the spectators. They had the possibility to make notes of there spontaneous impressions in a guestbook.
These unique elements were enlarging the project to a room installation, in which the single performance is only part of the whole thing. The concept itself got the actual work of art in which the 26 performances are assimilated. Here Yingmei Duan has designed an unconventional presentation that is different to normal exhibitions as well as to usual performance events.