
Opening Performance
March of the Dolls
2025
Live Performance Art, 10'00"
The artist, donning a doll costume, uses the body as a vessel for performance, weaving together balloons, projection, a water bucket, and cassette tape into a multi-layered ritual of history, sound, and corporeality. The performance begins as he inflates balloons, allowing projected imagery to intercept and cover both the balloons and his face. The projected footage—taken from Fort San Domingo—evokes the overlapping of colonial memory and local landscapes. While inflating, he sings into the balloon’s opening, fusing breath and voice into a tangible vessel of sound. The action then shifts to a bucket filled with water, where he sings Longing for the Spring Breeze, a song once banned, letting the melody dissolve into the water as a blurred, granular resonance that spreads like waves of energy. In the final act, he pulls out magnetic tape from a cassette, binding it in a circular arc around the bucket; biting the tape while singing Rainy Night Flower, he creates a live experience in which material tension, fractured sound, and lingering melody converge into a meditation on taboo, disappearance, and the regeneration of memory.

Yen-Chao HUANG’s practice spans painting, installation, performance, and video, consistently exploring the interface of the body, objects, and the politics of visibility and desire. His performances often disrupt modes of spectatorship through subtle yet radical gestures. In Membrane – The Enjoyment of Pleasure, the body confronts the sensory politics of transparency; in the Doll Nation – Doll Town series, he traverses urban boundaries in costume, using cuteness and heterotopia to dismantle gender norms and social gazes. Approaching from a queer perspective, he frequently employs unconventional materials—membranes, balloons, cassette tapes—to construct ritualistic micro-actions that oscillate between playfulness and danger. His body resists stable subjecthood; it becomes a site of binding, smearing, pulling, chewing, and unveiling—an unstable signal field that evokes an unresolved seduction of looking and the fragmented pleasures of rupture.

Yan-Chao HUANG
Yan-Chao HUANG