Chronicle Erotica
'Bondage rope show with contemporary arts'
5 June 2016 Sunday, 19:00-20:30
Aliwar Art Center, Multi purpose hall
Entry:SGD10 (tickets at the door)
28 Aliwal Street, Singapore 199918
Facebook event
https://www.facebook.com/events/1782381131995287/
Rope art: Subay
Kai Eng
Shawn Chua
'Bondage rope show with contemporary arts'
5 June 2016 Sunday, 19:00-20:30
Aliwar Art Center, Multi purpose hall
Entry:SGD10 (tickets at the door)
28 Aliwal Street, Singapore 199918
Facebook event
https://www.facebook.com/events/1782381131995287/
Rope art: Subay
Kai Eng
Shawn Chua
Photo by Wu Gnag Ng
We are inviting a Hong Kong artist Subay on 5 June 2016 at the Aliwar Art Center for new experimental show. The performance is collaboration with Subay (Rope Art) Kai Eng and Shawn Chua.
Chronicle Erotica explores into the art and non-art, silent and energy, tension and stillness, as well as ethnic and intellectual. It is an marriage of rope art (kinbaku, shibari) with dance and performance art.
Japanese Rope bondage is often called Shibari or Kinbaku, terms used interchangeably by the Japanese. Shibari literally means “to bind” and Kinbaku means “tight binding”. The word Shibari came into common language more recently, and outside the erotic world it does not necessarily identify a form of Bondage.
In Shibari the emphasis is not placed on the binding itself, but on how the rope is placed from the Rigger (in japanese kinbakushi), so as to become an extension of his hands, and on the relationship of intimacy so created. In short, the Japanese bondage concerns more the path that leads to the final result, than the result itself.
Kinbaku, unlike the Western bondage, is not a practice, but a real discipline, which involves what the Japanese call “kokoro”, i.e. “the heart, spirit and mind”, things can not be acquired through the mere knowledge of techniques and knots.
Today Japanese Bondage is not only a form of sadomasochistic constraint, but has become a real artistic expression, where the Rigger creates a sculpture by shaping the human body through ropes.
Shibari has a strong presence in the works of some renowned contemporary artists, mainly photographers, like Nobuyoshi Araki in Japan, Jim Duvall in the United States and Hikari Kesho in Europe.
Subay (Hong Kong)
Subay is a shibari performer and educator based in Hong Kong. She founded the Hong Kong Rope group in 2014 and has been organizing regular shibari events for the local community since then. In 2015, she started the first and only shibari studio in Hong Kong - Kokoro Studio. She is also an editor for an online shibari magazine, shibaru.life (縛・生) In 2016, she hosted the first Hong Kong Shibari Festival.
Subay was inspired by well-respected nawashi including Yukimura Haruki, Osada Steve, Jackwhipper and Nuitdetokyo. She does not subscribe to a particular ryu as she believes that shibari should be free and person-based - shibari is to achieve the liberation of one’s body, mind, heart and soul and build an unshakable bond between two persons. Her shibari is often described as caressing but intense, calming but adventurous, and also fun with a streak of sadism mixed with love.
In 2015, she performed in Morpheous Bondage Extravaganza in Manila and also numerous kinky and vanilla events in Hong Kong.
Eng Kai Er is an independent dance and theatre artist currently based in Singapore. In 2013/2014 Kai is participating in Directors’ Lab, a theatre directing mentorship programme organized by The Substation. Prior to that, Kai was involved in various dance-theatre projects in Sweden / Europe where she lived from 2007 to 2012. In Sweden she initiated the collective The Family, which created several performances/ workshops/ experiments, including “House Hole” (2010), a dance-theatre performance, and “Unmaking House Hole” (2011), an improvisation-based workshop/performance series that attempted to un-create the pre-existing performance. Her other Europe-based works include “fPhD” (2011), a fake thesis defence of a fake PhD degree, and “The Pleasure of Eating Oranges” (2013), a dance-theatre duet about love between two women, performed in Singapore, Toulouse, Berlin, Brussels and Stockholm in 2013. Kai has also created a full-length dance-theatre solo performance, “The Prayer” (2012), commissioned by the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2012. “The Prayer” was subsequently shortlisted for the Outstanding Performance Award at Prague Fringe Festival 2012.
In Singapore, Kai is currently interested in developing projects that investigate society, freedom, independence and HAPPINESS!, so in 2014 Kai started doing dance improvisations on the MRT without anybody’s permission. When Kai is not working on her performance or art projects, her hobbies include artistic inline skating, pole dancing and contact improvisation.
Shawn Chua
Shawn's works often linger uncertainly in the uncanny, engaging conceptual evocations of puppetry, and exploring the abominable loves of person-thing relations, whether in plant personhoods, cyborg romances or in the kneading of a dough-body. In his performance practice, he hopes to disrupt the imagination of a hermetically autonomous self to allow for the unrecognizable otherness of things and also of persons, so that emergent forms of vitality might transpire. Shawn is the co-founder of Thing-Spaces, a series of experimental salons that have been held in New York, Sao Paulo and Singapore, and his works have been presented by the World Policy Institute and the Queens Botanical Garden, Falchi, and Panoply Performance Laboratory in New York, USA, and most recently by the AMORPH!14 International Performance Art Festival in Helsinki, Finland. He is a recipient of the National Arts Council Scholarship from Singapore and he holds a MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Waseda University in Tokyo.
