How can you not wet your shoes when you walk along the river?

Art for Baoyang Zhao is to capture the moment when a handmade cake touches their tongue, when wind, carrying the bright sunlight, touches their curtain with pink floral prints. Those meetings through their eyes or nose or hearings going into their body generate a sensorial or emotional experience. The complex experience can start from a simple scenario with a specific smell or light or sound. Zhao starts their sculpture with elements from this simple scenario to explore how it can be spoken by the sculptural language.  Combining with the material choice, it provides a bodily experience from which a deeper and complex expression can be evoked.  Zhao starts their sculpture with their body experience and receive it through their body experience. In this sense, their body is their context.

This project for Exboot talks about the bodily pleasure with the absence of the body. The artist explore the topic under the context of their experience as non-binary person. The liminality of their body aligns with the key experience with pleasure which dwells only on the border of land and water, indulgence and restriction. We hear the whisper of the pleasure under the water meanwhile we know the land is where we can stand on. We wet our shoes. We linger and we walk along the river. But what will be wet when a ghost floating along the river? what will be left when the body is missing?

Instagram Baoyang Zhao