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Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart
Art Center Ongoing
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Artists
Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi, Law Yuk Mui, Boat Zhang
One heartbeat, two heartbeats; walking by one, walking as two.
“Only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart,” writes the diasporic poet Ocean Vuong. To walk with another heart is not as most idealised narratives on modern motherhood go, a harmonious synchronisation of the rhythms of lives, but often a tumultuous coming-together, even clashing, of different vibrations, breathing, weights, shivering, and pacing. Carrying multiple pulsations, the mother’s body is a transforming site of fulfilment and breakage, addition and deprivation, intimacy and violence, clamorous and tranquillity.
Presenting recent works of three female artists, Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi (Hong Kong), Law Yuk Mui (Hong Kong) and Boat Zhang (Shanghai), Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart is a polyphonic composition blending the artists’ experience of motherhood, migrant-hood, and the changing rhythms of the corporal and the everyday. Raising their children in Japan, the three artists-mothers reposition their mentality and identity to a new cultural context while carrying and caring for a second beating heart. They explore “intimacy” and “nurturing” towards a deeper, more complex stratum where an intense process of inter-shaping occurs continuously.
In the exhibition space, different sounds and tempos converge—walking, running, chopping, smearing, music playing—echoing the destabilising and self-severing experience of mothering and migrating. The maternal body, a swelling, leaking, forgetting, remembering, and shape-shifting vessel, softly occupies the exhibition space, unsettling its spatial tempo and architectural features. If the body and bodily labour of the mother signify home and the process of home-making, Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart opens an intimate space of sensibility in which the corporality of home and mother are heard, touched, caressed, and re-composed.
“Only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart,” writes the diasporic poet Ocean Vuong. To walk with another heart is not as most idealised narratives on modern motherhood go, a harmonious synchronisation of the rhythms of lives, but often a tumultuous coming-together, even clashing, of different vibrations, breathing, weights, shivering, and pacing. Carrying multiple pulsations, the mother’s body is a transforming site of fulfilment and breakage, addition and deprivation, intimacy and violence, clamorous and tranquillity.
Presenting recent works of three female artists, Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi (Hong Kong), Law Yuk Mui (Hong Kong) and Boat Zhang (Shanghai), Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart is a polyphonic composition blending the artists’ experience of motherhood, migrant-hood, and the changing rhythms of the corporal and the everyday. Raising their children in Japan, the three artists-mothers reposition their mentality and identity to a new cultural context while carrying and caring for a second beating heart. They explore “intimacy” and “nurturing” towards a deeper, more complex stratum where an intense process of inter-shaping occurs continuously.
In the exhibition space, different sounds and tempos converge—walking, running, chopping, smearing, music playing—echoing the destabilising and self-severing experience of mothering and migrating. The maternal body, a swelling, leaking, forgetting, remembering, and shape-shifting vessel, softly occupies the exhibition space, unsettling its spatial tempo and architectural features. If the body and bodily labour of the mother signify home and the process of home-making, Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart opens an intimate space of sensibility in which the corporality of home and mother are heard, touched, caressed, and re-composed.
Schedule | Feb 8 (Sat) 2025-Feb 23 (Sun) 2025 Opening Hours Information
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| Fee | Free | ||
| Website | https://www.ongoing.jp/tag/video/beatingheart/ | ||
| Venue | Art Center Ongoing http://www.ongoing.jp/en/ | ||
| Location | 1-8-7 Kichijoji-Higashicho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo 180-0002 | ||
| Access | 9 minute walk from the North exit of Kichijoji Station on the JR Chuo and Sobu lines or Keio Inokashira line. | ||
| Phone | 0422-26-8454 | ||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
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