4A Beijing Residency
I woke up at 730am and dragged myself down to the hotel gym for a very half assed bit of exercise before heading back up to my room and packing my stuff up. I met Justin at breakfast and we had our last buffet feast and caught up on his adventures the night before. After breakfast I went upstairs and chatted to Anna for a while before checking out at 11am. The concierge guy has been super useful and he organised a taxi for us to drive back to Hoairou. We got back to Shen’s by 1pm and I threw everything into the wash. Yeunzu whipped us up a massive bowl of noodles, she is an absolute powerhouse and never stops working. Around 2pm a bunch of people rocked up for the afternoon talks and we were joined by Silja and the other German artist Kristina. Joanna, Joe, Lisa Roet and her film-maker Stefan showed up as well. The talks were super interesting again, I changed mine around a little and just showed lot’s of work with the titles and only a few details. It get’s tough translating so much information so this was a better way of sharing I thought. The last talk was by a Chinese experimental theatre maker Tan Zeen, his work was awesome – a complete subversion of theatre, inserting action into real life and throwing all the rules out the window. We had some incredibly sad news as well, the artist Sun Shaokun who talked at the last forum as well as coming along to Justin’s performance took her own life two days ago. We were all blown away, she was such a strong woman and the work she was making demonstrated that. She’d sent me a WeChat message only a few days ago saying how much she liked my work. I responded saying thank you and what an amazing artist she was. I really appreciate the fact that we got to meet her and share her work, I hope that she has found her peace. In that very brief meeting she left a really strong impression on us all and I hope her work lives on. After the forum we all got stuck into a giant feast with about 20 guests. We drank a lot of wine and Justin did another magical performance. Silja played the piano for us, it turns out she’s actually pretty amazing. It was getting kind of late for me so I went upstairs to chat to Anna and ended up falling asleep on one of the vintage barber chairs on the balcony. I took this as a sign to go to sleep so I ghosted out and hit the hay.