Three-channel HD video, color & sound, Chinese w/ English subtitles, 9’00’’

Courtesy the artist and MAGICIAN SPACE

Molt (Body Inspection) continues Yao Qingmei’s interest in the complex tensions between music, dance, text and video. A female dancer and security inspectors set a scene of a “body inspection” dance theater performance, using a comical striptease and mechanical dance performance to convey the polar opposition between naked life and the mechanical screws of power. It is often difficult to distinguish between the inspectors, those maintainers of order, and naked life. A chorus emerges in the likeness of an ancient Greek chorus, viewers embedded in the artwork. They serve as powerful jurors presiding over the progression of the opera, mocking the players and passing divine judgments, but also being unruly spectators. In the gaps between dance and music, there sometimes emerge long passages of stillness and silence. At this time, the visitors fall under the persistent gaze of the female dancer, the inspectors and the chorus. Onsite, the practical space of the fourth wall truly becomes a panoptical theater. Music in a solemn, epic style is interwoven with the songs of Marylin Monroe in a pastiche method that frequently emerges in Yao Qingmei's works. In the lyrics, the artist continues to use collage techniques, appropriating and transposing such literary and philosophical terms as “big brother”, “Leviathan”, “abyss”, “Homo sacer” and “panopticon” as footnotes to the security assembly line.