Body and Communication: The ‘Ordinary’ Art of Tang Da Wu

Abstract

What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.

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