Qiyun Zheng

Take time to reflect on your body: what constitutes your body. What body are you? Have you let that body be present in your work? Have you presented your body in your work? If so, how so? If not, what do you think it could do to the artwork if you put your body as the content of the work?

A Female Body: breaking norms of aesthetics

I’m always aware of my female body since I was born, and I wished to grow faster to have a “complete” female body that is plump and radiates sexual charm.

It’s always the female characteristics I appreciate the most. And in this female body, I feel safe. When I sense my long hair brushing my back, and my clothes hugging my curves, I feel the most confident and comfortable.

After fighting with body anxiety for years, I had made peace with sick aesthetics. Now, I’ve reached the state where I’ve abandoned the aesthetic norm and appreciate my female body as it is.

I take on gender as my major lens to observe this world. My body works as a translator; it practices in the world problematized with gender, giving materials from which I can work to understand Gender better. My body experiences, experiments, talks, exchanges, and writes.

A Dancing/Performing Body: a deeper trust to body/self

In Voguing performances, I had a hard time searching for my signature moves, because it’s actually hard to find what is the thing only I can do. I experienced vast disappointing moments when I did something interesting and found the next day that somebody already did it twenty years ago.

But by letting go of the competitive mind that I have to do something unique to impress others, I go back to myself, my own body. I spent time with my body and had fun experimenting with it. With patience and trust, I acknowledge this: my body can surprise me, my body is amazing.

A Micro Body: body as an enlarged canvas

The next stage is a complete let go of “making something”. I take on a ritual to appreciate my body, starting from a very micro extent. What can one part of my body do? To what extent can it move like this? How can another part share this concept of moving? Or, simply what does this part’s shape look like? How is the curve of this part, or the lines in the skin?

upper left: a bruised knee

upper right: an eye with eyelashes

down left: a folded leg

down right: an inner ankle

Not a _____ (still photos, 2022) is currently censored on Chinese media platforms for being “vulgar and overexposure, violating regulations against the following but not limiting to 2.1 skin exposure or sexual implication; 2.2 insulting, shaming text; 2.3 against basic social moral norms; 2.4 displaying inappropriate underage behaviors, harmful to underage wellbeing.”

(text translated according to picture on the right)

A De-disciplining Body: what a body does?

Then the whole “de-discipline” thing hits in.

What can my body do if I reduce the movements (the dancing part)? What is left in the performance, then? What is a de-disciplined body? Does it mean I abandon moves and reduce the body to a non-danceable body that performs mundane everyday life?

The answer is absolutely not giving up on dancing, but I’m comprehending this by understanding my moving body is more than doing a dance; the body is thinking and taking charge, while my brain is not (where most of the time, the discipline part takes control). To de-discipline means, my body speaks louder than the disciplines, and I am listening to my body more than the disciplines, if not entirely so.

A Displaced Asian Body: cultural and personal characteristics in exile

Am I appropriating my culture? Can I appropriate my culture? To what extent can I appropriate my culture? Is this my culture? Do I belong to a culture?

These questions are put forward whenever I’m in a public place in the Netherlands, far from China. Though I didn’t even feel melted entirely in, because my young, colorful female body constantly popped out from the whole picture in the Chinese context, here my body is even more popping out. My distinct bone structures, skin color, and dressing style constantly remind me that I am a displaced body.

Language too. I suddenly realized some days ago I’m starting to think in English. Though since a child I’ve been practicing English by creating an English-speaking environment for myself, literally, trying to speak to myself in English, and English has always been a big part of my life (my BA program in English Translation and half of my working language is English), it never occurred to me that English is my thinking language so natural without me noticing it after a while. Where is my mother tongue in my body now? It seems to be excluded from my daily mind. My friends from non-English speaking countries once had a conversation with me about keeping their accents, because we do not need to choose to be colonized by the colonizer’s language. But the concept of being colonized is so not familiar in my mind, in the Chinese history book, it is always “semi-colonized”; in education institutions, people are always proud of speaking in a standard British or American accent; in modern Chinese society, there is no hatred towards those semi-colonizers.

But I’d rather look at all these from a positive angle, that these push me back closer to “my culture”. I started to investigate things from Asian culture that I took for granted and never reflected upon. I volunteered to practice Asian customs and raised initiatives to do “Asian” things, like practicing Chinese calligraphy, drinking tea, celebrating traditional Chinese festivals, and reading about traditional Chinese culture. I remind myself almost everyday to “use” my mother tongue, the language that was existing in my body without much awareness in daily life.

I hug my characteristics that not even every Chinese has: slanted eyes, plain facial bone structures, hair color, preferences, and the fact that I learned Chinese folk dance when I was really little. Someone told me I can make a big money out of performing Chinese traditional dance in the Netherlands. Someone read my performances with a filter of mystical Oriental culture.

A Body With Soft Power: a practice of safe protest

stay safe, because nowhere is a paradise for not considering the consequences of any kind of protest

I need to take care of my body, and keep it safe from unexpected harm.

This is also what I’m currently exploring – unlearning the authority and protesting safely.

My Body in My Work

My body is always shown in my work as an object, a facilitator, a medium, or a character (often the main character), as I’m constantly working with the idea of “the female body as a translator” in my performances.

Even in some work where I do not show an image of myself, my body is undoubtedly still present, with its female living experience.

Even from the time when I did not start to reflect on my work, my body has been there in my works, for I experience the world with my body, and my body is my medium of showing and performing.