chatted about / archive / a hard baby cleans / a passenger / blown cover / christ and spiderman / democracy now / fall / fixation object / fruit / hagia sophia / laptop masturbation / lurker / pietà / six-headed entangled figure / sleep noises / triple vision / untitled (shirt)

CNH
In your work, you said you like to explore the physical and emotional connotations we attach to objects that are in relation to the human body. You explained how the ceramic armor makes weight visible, a weight that is reductive in the sense that it restricts typical bodily movements. You tried to explore this restriction through stillness, adopting the status of object. Given your experience with dance and performance, what can you share about the differentiation between motion and stillness? And do you see stillness to be resisting anything in particular?

TAITAI
When I first started making my own performance work, I did everyday menial work slowly and created a narrative about a figure caught and overcome by the materials she brought to the performance space. I thought that in moving slowly I gave the stage to those tasks and objects. With my prior experience as a contemporary-modern dancer, I also thought I was subverting the hierarchy of the certain codified dance movements I was trained to do for many years that were seen as more valuable. In cleaning/multitasking/balancing/traveling/crawling slowly, I thought I was highlighting the beauty of the mundane. But as time went on, I saw that I was becoming virtuosic in exacting those movements. In performing cleaning/multitasking/balancing/traveling/crawling movements that I had slowed down, I felt myself exude confidence and exaltation of my capabilities and training.
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In a work like A hard baby: You for me and me for You, in standing still, I was trying to resist my audience from marveling at my capabilities and training. In general, my decision to move away from dance movements and perform works that moved the body slowly, to the aspiration of being still, was to bring my audiences into a state of introspection and less into a place of admiration. With that line of thinking, I did consider the context of the figure was more important to work on. It then became very important to develop what the body was moving with and not just how the body was moving. Before my A hard baby performances, I started with covering my face with materials like bubble wrap. And in the new piece (A hard baby), the ceramic armor I wore on my nude body was meant to blur any specific identity markers of my humanness, in hopes to connect with human audiences (who besides having bodies like me) I have not shared my life experiences and identify otherwise.

CNH
Your older work features a lot of manufactured objects. For example, in your piece Washing+精靈, you used cleaning wipes to construct a poncho or shawl to cover your body. You complicate the meaning and function of the wipes by repurposing them as something wearable. In your performances, the piece is paired with abstract bodily movements. You’re wiping the floors with your whole body or gripping the poncho, squeezing out its liquid. However, you mentioned that one of your concerns with manufactured objects is that it distracts the viewer. There is much to consider about viewers’ associations with the objects they perceive. How are you combating this challenge, especially as you try to incorporate handmade objects?

TAITAI
When I am making objects now, I seek to find a way to shape contradictory qualities (of their textures, functions, and design) together into a cohesive unit. I think the best example of this is my recent studio experiments making a gelatin pedestal from plastic wrapped cardboard gift boxes, so that I can display my ceramic armor pieces on top. Or as you mentioned earlier, molding ceramic armor pieces to my body, knowing they will shrink in the kiln, and forcing them to refit onto me through ribbons and shoelaces.

CNH
Once, you told me that you see performance as a process, not a final product. For you, performance is meant to encapsulate a feeling. In your most recent work this summer, specifically your performance A Hard Baby Tries Climbing (To Success), you once again incorporate your ceramic armor. I have not seen this piece in person, but based on the description you shared with me, the performance seems like a metaphor for your struggle and role as an artist. Can you tell me a little more about the process involved in this performance?

TAITAI
What inspires me to move and make marks is an ability to express a different somatic experience of moving through different landscapes (light, heavy, sharp, smooth, tall, short, linear, circular) within my own body and movements. And when I paint or draw, the different way I use the utensil results in different textures of the marks on the page. But since drawing leaves behind a visual evidence that people can take time to interpret or feel, movement in performance is so ephemeral, I can see how I needed to give my audience more context to the figure that is moving. This is how I came about to physicalize those different landscapes with the A hard baby series. My idea was that the ceramic armor not only protects me but communicates the weight that I move through. And I think the weight of the armor can be perceived as literal weight or samskaras (past imprints in Sanskrit) of life experiences and memories that we all carry around with us.

CNH
I see! The armor's physical, metaphorical, and visible weight are like impressions of the past. These impressions influence how you or the body impacted by the armor moves through the world. Aside from your experience as a dancer and artist, you are also a yoga instructor. Your work as an artist combines or questions all these different roles you have participated in. I wonder, if taken apart or removed from your body, does the armor, as individual pieces, take on a new role or meaning? Are they still an extension of the body that wears it or evidence of a past experience and identity?

TAITAI
These are really good questions because I am currently working on how to display the armor without me performing with them! With each performance, an armor piece or two will break. After each performance I go through the process of gluing any cracks with epoxy before a new performance. In displaying the armor pieces without performance, I want to show remnants of the effort of performance to shed past behavior or thought conditioning that may no longer serve us now.