May 26, 2024

Proof of Life is an endurance performance art piece, co-created by artists Anna Pan, Nathanie Ngu, and Kelsey Chen, curated by June Kitahara and enveloped by the large-scale set design of Brian Lam and sound design by 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.

Here, viewers were 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, the deep somatic hums of our fragile bodies. All this unfolded in a protected space of communion created by the lending of bodies unto one another.

This is proof.