02 Proof of Life

Performance Art

Proof of Life

Proof of Life is an endurance performance art piece, co-created by artists Nathanie Ngu, Anna Pan & Kelsey Chen, and enveloped by the large-scale set design of Brian Lam and sound design by Nathanie Ngu. The performance stages the ancestral practice of tattooing and bloodletting through a ritual rooted in themes of Buddhist reincarnation, rebirth, generational trauma, Taoist philosophies of unification, and bodily vulnerability.

The markings ritualized onto Ngu and Pan’s bodies are designed and placed by Chen as an offering of witness, sisterhood, and accompaniment through the terror and joy of our unfolding humanity: such marks make an entrance into the energetic matrix of the body through key meridian points, engaging generational, ancestral, and personal histories to offer a gateway of insight, an opening for release, and a site for the continued metabolism of that which each performer’s life works at and works through.

Alongside video and sensory elements, the performance centers on the transcendent power of bodywork and metaphysical pain. Through immersion in a collective, spontaneous, and reflexive choreography; in space made thick with smoke; and in time made gummy, dense, the amber moment of performance invites the performers and audience alike into a communal hum of discomfort and awakening. The act of witnessing pain has become synonymous with a passive engagement in an optics of suffering that exploits the body. Here, viewers are invited into co-constituting a ritual space alongside the performers, an alchemy of mutual flesh witness that opens space not only to watch the performers but also to witness oneself–the pain, latent and endemic, we each carry in our own bodies. All this unfolds in a protected space of communion created by the lending of bodies unto one another.