Moth-er in Cityscape

//Like the solitude life of Moth in a circle

 

Performance in ‘Table’, Chartered Garden, Hong Kong

Curated by OneMinuteBefore and Yang Yeng

 

2008

The person who grows moths in order to collect their silk is called a moth-er. They limit the moths to laying eggs in circles. The moths exhaust their lives by giving birth to eggs. Then, they leave the circle, and their life are over. Only the pattern of their eggs remain as trace of their existence and their disappearance all at the same time. The self-completing process of life is solitude.

 

I see this solitude in my mothers and that of my own.

 

My mother is a minimalist. She does almost everything by herself, leads a simple life but is prepared. She has even bought her own small gravestone for her ashes already. That gravestone is a unit arranged like ‘a tiny flat in a building’ in a flat itself. Her stone is near deceased aunt’s stone. She said: ´Then you will know where to visit me when I am not here.´ I was shocked.

 

For me, desire is trouble, unrest and catastrophe. It is dynamic but risky in life. But by keeping myself in solitude, I can avoid life’s catastrophes. Gradually, life is completed. A calm death is the destiny like disappearing.

 

‘Moth-er’, the performance was a micro representation of a life of solitude in 2 ½ hours. Audience could gaze out at a fishpond view from the footbridge.