Kiang Malingue is pleased to present in its New York space From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein, a group exhibition curated by Brook Hsu. Taking its title from a 1969 text by ankoku butoh (暗黒舞踏) dancer and founder Tatsumi Hijikata, the exhibition considers a wide range of artforms and pays close attention to artists dedicated to working with paper, in ceramic, and who approach traditional art vocations such as painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, and performance with an expanded understanding of their medium’s potential.

I learned about butoh about twenty years ago when I stumbled into a dance workshop in Paris. To my disappointment, there was little skill in my body to perform well at it. When some of the dancers put on a set of performances at the end of the workshop, something broke in me. Never had I ever seen anything like it. Butoh seemed to accommodate every ache I had for secrets and transgressions. Returning home to Midwestern America, I searched for a way to continue to learn more about butoh, but there were scant resources on the subject, save for a piece of writing by Hijikata, which I coveted. What jealousy I may have harbored in regards to Hijikata, may be reflected in my desire to also have tea, as he did, with the geisha and prostitute Sada Abe. I longed to be Hijikata and fabricated a fantasy of a forbidden love triangle between myself as Hijikata, Abe, and the writer Yukio Mishima. Over the years, my heart composed many songs across the image of Hijikata’s boney ribs.

I find myself now in a desperate state of mind about what people value in art today, where certain rules and conventions, and ways of thinking contradict the way art actually feels and what it means to be human. More so, I find that art making, solitary as the artist may be, is exacerbated by a degree of alienation that is detrimental to the artist’s survival. Art is both a solitary act and a social activity, as the artist and the viewer make attempts at building new structures of understanding.

From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein reaches its audience in the form of a dance play, and an occasion to commune with Hijikata’s precious words:

I have yearned again and again for the meaning of where to start, a meaning I have not been able to ascertain in my own life and which does not come alive in my talent. I cherish wet animals and the bodies of the old, withered like dead trees, precisely because I believe that through them I may be able to come close to my desire. My body longs to be cut into pieces and to hide itself somewhere cold. I think that is, after all, the place to which I shall return and am certain that, frozen hard and about to fall down, what my eyes have seen there is simply an intimacy with things which continue to die their own deaths.¹

We think of the gallery as a place that is neutral, but it isn’t. Every seed of becoming can cast a shadow on material. In this space, we are not innocent. We are here in a garden theater. One’s motion through this space is intended to feel guided

Every object and image exudes an existence like a mumbled word, hardly articulated and barely understood. Then, all of a sudden, it blooms.

How are stories formed? From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein does not tell any story in particular.  It expands and contracts around the primordial makings of stories themselves. Can an artwork be a dancer? My hope is that this dance play will serve to produce visions and sensations for the viewer. Your own imagination is given center stage. Comprised of five acts occurring in simultaneity, each artwork will dance to express subtle and open definitions:

I: Process

II: Material

III: Form

IV: Animal

V: Memory

BH

¹ Hijikata, Tatsumi. “From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein.” TDR/The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (MIT Press, March 2000): 56–59.