I started 2020 by studying performance art with Marilyn Arsem in Venice where I met many amazing performance artists from all over the world. It was a life-changing experience to learn, practice, and witness durational performance art. My passport got stolen along with the wallet right before my final performance in Venice, I missed my returning flights, had no clue of how long I would be staying in Italy by myself, without money. I received lots of love, and things finally got sorted out. I flew through Africa on the first day of Chinese New Year, then got back to Canada. At that point, I thought this probably be the biggest thing that happens to me this year, but soon, the city where I came from, Wuhan, became famous everywhere. I learned a new word called Coronavirus. I worried about family and friends and a couple of months later, they began to worry about me as the virus spread around the world.
One of the powerful things I discovered in performance art is healing. I thought it would be nice to end 2020 by practicing a performance exercise. In December 2020, I did a series of daily performance experiments. For 31 days, I did the same thing – start with an empty canvas and filled the canvas without any preplanned idea of how I will do it. The whole process was improvised. Each day, I start broadcasting at the same time, 4pm PT, and the performance ends when the canvas turns fully black. The duration of each day’s performance varied – the shortest one was 1 min, and the longest one was 11 hours 45 mins.
Most of the days were screen-based durational performance, using the iPad as the drawing medium, and iPad pencil as the drawing tool. The last two days, I changed to physical hands-on materials like Oil Painting Canvas, and mirrors.
Daily Livestream link: https://youtube.com/channel/UCa9ZN0ESGBkcjvgLGaYSUVw
Daily updating notes (warning: random thoughts after each performance, there may have errors and typos, unedited)
*This webpage is constantly updating as the work is still in development, please feel free to check back occasionally.
Gao Yujie 