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24 Bottles (2023)
24 Bottles is a performance where I prepare 22 brown bottles and collect subjects from outside and inside of my body, it includes water, pee, alcohol, vomit, chilly oil, sweat, lime juice, saliva, milk, fart, blood, fear, onion juice, tear, wasabi, snot, air, burp, raw egg white, hair, aloe vera and skin. Each two of them are connected (what our body consumes and what we discharge). I choose a sexy and attractive outfit on purpose too to reinforce people’s racial and sexual stereotypes towards me. I sit in public at York University, Canada in front of Starbucks and ask the audience to feed me with one of the bottles. No one knows what is in the bottle until I taste it. I pass a label that indicates what’s in the bottles to each audience after I know what it is and they all have different reactions. By consuming them at the same time, I rebuild a connection between what we accept and what we discharge (what we hate). And that as humans, we should not only be comfortable with what we choose to consume but also accept how our body helps us to process them.
Cubist Pears Sale (2023)
Cubist Pears Sale is a performance where I bought 100 pears from Walmart, place them on a floral fabric, cut them into cubist shapes and sell them to the audience for 3 dollars each. This piece means to investigate the value of labour and cost during the artists’ progress in making art. When we see art most of the time, we pay more attention to the results instead of the process. By doing this piece, I revisit the labour of an artwork’s production and tell the audience that the real juicy parts (the pulp that’s thrown away) don’t get enough appreciation.
I choose a pear because a pear is meaningless. When people see an apple they think of Adam and Eve when people see a banana or peach they associated it with genitalia. Almost every fruit has a story behind it. Pear is awkward, it’s well-known but not the yummiest nor the most popular.
I spent 93 dollars on the pears and eventually I sold them for 84 dollars in total. At the end of the performance, I started to carry the cubist pear around and asked people to buy them to increase my chance of selling (my outfit serves the same purpose). The duration of the performance is 2 hours.
Donghui Liu 