Jiangliu Dong
董江柳
Artist
Liminality in Similarity
I fetishize boundaries:
Boundary as a site, a state, a setting, and a scene;
as a duration, a being, a situation, a transition, and a condition;
as a crease, an imprint, a trace, an event, and an action
Boundary is liminality.
We live in a world where the proliferation of Sameness forms the transformations that impact our social existence. The lack of limits and boundaries leads to a sense of emptiness, meaninglessness, and depression. Within this social context of our time, in response, my art seeks to explore where the boundary lies between similarities. I set a betwixt-and-between situation in my artworks, which is a conscious effort to infuse a bit of fantasy and otherness, to insert distance between our over-communication, and to yield a threshold amidst the over-comparable meanings.
My work is an act of transgressions, a series of deliberate oversteps into the spaces between self and others, public and private, the signifier and the sensory, presence and absence, the tangible and the intangible.
It transcends the translation of words, the movement of body, and experiences and states of being -- it is to access meaning as becoming.
So to say, text, body, and performance are all important materials in my work.
Text: I expand not just the borders between languages but also the boundaries between different semiotic modes. Here, text extends beyond words, it has been stretched into a realm where signs, gestures, objects and symbols converge --a table, a chair, an alien word, a brooch, a ring, a sound, or a perception. It's a floating river, it fluxes through the threshold of languages and becomes an experience of/with the bodies-- a moment in time, an object in space.
Body and Performance: At the heart of the liminal space of my work is the body, which, led by the text and object, animates the narrative, rewriting it with each interaction, each movement, each breath, thereby completing a performative moment.
This is the essence of my work – the beauty in the transient, the poetry in the liminal, explore the fluidity and transitory nature of boundaries, and the endless possibilities that lie within the liminal spaces of similarity.