M Gallery, CICA Museum
June 25 – 29, 2025
2025.6.25 – 29
1, Me, My, Mine
Through the combination of self-performance art and moving images, this exhibition explores the individual’s identity, emotional expression and physical experience in contemporary society. By capturing and presenting moments of self-expression through video, the artists use the interplay of body, language, context and technical media to reflect on the relationship between the self and the external world. The exhibition showcases a number of moving image works, which often do not adhere to traditional narrative structures, but rather explore the potential of the body as a vehicle for expression through experimental visual language and repetitive body movements. Through the direct presentation of the body, self performance art removes all formal modifications and distances, allowing the audience to face the artist’s truest and most direct self. In this era of informationization and virtualization, the artist tries to challenge the fluidity and diversity of the concept of “self” through the use of moving images. The exhibition invites viewers to re-examine the way of self-expression in art creation and its reconstruction under the lens and video technology. Each work shows how individuals reconstruct their identity through the intertwining of body, voice, movement and emotion from different perspectives, echoing the identity crisis and self-expression dilemma faced by individuals in contemporary society.
Yao Ruitian lives and works in Guangzhou and London. His works combine performance, material, environment and space to explore the conflict between the individual and social characteristics such as vernacularity, urban development and interpersonal relationships in the context of East Asian culture. Based on this, he tries to deconstruct the current social norms and behavioural practices, provide a poetic perspective to give them new cultural and practical meanings, and reshape the reality of the contours of the living space.
