When artist Khiang Hei performed Space Within at the Bophana Centre on December 19, almost 50 people found themselves tied up in his experimental, mostly improvised installation. Greg Bem reports on the ensuing twists and turns.
It’s the end of the performance. Borey, a friend, collects metres and metres of the pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon and slowly approaches me, wielding it en masse. He wears a grin like a scythe ready to cut me open. The main performers have already taken their bows and are filtering into the audience for necessary post-event socialising. And so the cameras refocus on Borey and me, waiting to see what will happen. Everything is dragging, slow motion, etiquette and style and purpose, and then Borey acts: with great effort, he wraps me in a cocoon of filthy ribbon fouled by water and dirt. In an act of retaliation, I reposition half of the chromatic snare around Borey’s torso, thus ensuring we’ll both look like fools or geniuses in unison. The chaos of ribbon, soaked by water, is slick and disgusting, rubbing liquid against our skin, ruining our clothes. I look off in the distance and notice Khiang Hei’s nod of approval.
I’ve known Khiang Hei for a couple of months, having first been introduced on a late-night rooftop above Street 63’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Khiang used to live in Manhattan and I remember his loud NYC expressions driving my original attraction to him. Across the room I listened to his conversations on Washington Heights and an American urban landscape I’ve come to love and hate and know over the past five years: racial divides, geographical decay, gritty artist struggles. This realm of chatter was quite the typical exchange for a party of cheap booze, homely Singaporean cooking and constant blood extractions from ankle-frenzied mosquitos. White meat.
A few coffee meetings and an established friendship later, I wound up at Bophana Centre. Aside from a handful of photograph prints and a variety of explicit sculptures in his apartment, I hadn’t encountered Khiang’s art before and certainly didn’t know much about what he planned for Space Within. While we did toss ideas for this event around at a restaurant on Pasteur a few times, I was still in the dark. New updates were made to the Facebook event nearly every day. A video from October 2012 surfaced and I watched Cambodian dancers (and Khiang himself) spontaneously throwing objects and each other around the central space on the ground floor at Bophana. I was reminded of Merce Cunningham.
And now it’s 2013. The audience, made up of around 50 expats and Cambodians, sits in chairs pointing toward the central space of Bophana’s ground floor. Khiang is circling the room, passing out wafer-like cookies and what he calls “worms”, a Chinese New Year treat made of flour and coconut milk. They look like worms and they are delicious, almost melting inside your mouth. After his first circuit he makes a second round, distributing unused coils of pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon to each person in the space.
The performance, if it hasn’t already begun, is definitely in full swing now that the audience has been equipped. There is beautiful, hesitant Ouk Channita half-dancing across the room: there is exploration, grace and intelligence. There is Ali Ben with some manner of hand drum easily bringing up a beat and then discarding it at a moment’s notice. Trumpeter Steffen slowly blasts out notes and garbles of sound, just loud enough to keep the audience alert without damaging or distracting.
I’m fumbling with my camera and then look up to see Khiang standing right in front of me. “Start it off,” he says, and then motions for me to use my ribbon. I do, as Borey, sitting next to me, would do, and as everyone in the audience will soon do as well: I tie my blue ribbon to Khiang’s and slowly unwind the coil as he proceeds to move away, onward.
The rainbow of ribbon, a madness of string, goes from strands to waves cascading behind an enraged Khiang. There is purer and purer motion, energy, force, breakage. The audience stares sitting, gaping, googly-eyed as he moves around the room, lines get crossed and tangled and the installed material becomes one beautiful, impeding mess. Previously open and passable, the space becomes more and more impassable with each step Khiang takes. The musicians struggle to stand in security along the periphery of the centrum. Khiang’s bound appendages and torso create a constraint on the movement in and out of the room’s centre. What is the Space Within? What is apparent the moment the audience realises their contribution to the performance isn’t just a beautiful form of ribbon, but a locking down of a sentient being?
Khiang is so overwhelmed by ribbon he is unable to move. He becomes the puppet, with the entire audience a puppeteer collective. Ribbon is to be pulled by everyone. I yank on my ribbon and watch Khiang try to yank back, yank back on mine, but grab hold of bundles of ribbon belonging to groups of ten other hands from within the crowd. There is ribbon in the corners. There is ribbon under feet. There is a large basin of water in the centre of the room and ribbon dangles into it, slides through it, causing the room to become slippery. Khiang tries to control his movement, but gets caught by the currents of power from many wrists. The people of the room, from the audience to the other performers and even including some of the photographers, want to pull Khiang toward them.
In an ejaculatory fury, Khiang manages to rip free from his bonds and exhaust himself in the ‘space without’. Members of the audience laugh. Or look disturbed. Or confused. Or all of the above. The focus of the audience gently transitions to other performers, who engage subtly with the now deadened material lingering like litter throughout the space. The energy dims. Several women are invited into the crowd to dance. I am motioned by one of the performers to join in the dance, a conga line sans torso clutch, and everything is slightly more absurd, the giant water container in the room’s centre, dead ribbon scattered everywhere. Prematurely, the performance is called to an end. It feels too soon, but then I notice Borey. He’s walking toward me and the mass of ribbon he has collected is firmly between his hands…